The Feeder Company Leaderboard: Which Companies are the Best Schools for Future CPOs and CPTOs?
Amazon leads as the top feeder company: ~13% of CPOs and CPTOs worldwide have worked there at some point in their careers. But….
We recently mapped the global CPO talent pool within B2B and B2C segments that have either operated in the consumer market or have the potential to do so. To do this, we identified 16,000 product leaders who previously worked at one or more of 822 target companies worldwide. Those organizations include:
Mature B2C marketplace businesses
B2B SaaS businesses that also operate marketplace elements
PLG SaaS companies, including the most prominent Product-Led Growth players
Hybrid PLG & SLG SaaS companies
Then, we filtered for anyone whose current title includes CPO, CPTO, Chief Product Officer, or Chief Product & Technology Officer. That gave us 1,112 profiles globally.
Then came the fun part: analyzing their career history. Which companies are actually the best training grounds for future CPOs and CPTOs? Which organizations on a resume instantly signal quality and strong product training?
Let’s find out which companies are producing the most C-level product leaders.
Which companies train the most marketplace CPOs/CPTOs?
We found a total of 3,512 companies in our dataset. But to make the visual easier to digest, we focused on the top 20 feeder companies.
As you can see, Amazon can be considered the best school, with over 100 product alumni. That means ~13% of CPOs/CPTOs globally have spent time at Amazon at some point in their careers. It puts the company well ahead of other tech giants like Google, Microsoft, or Meta.
You’ll also notice B2C marketplace businesses, especially in travel, are major feeders of product talent. During our analysis, companies like Expedia, Skyscanner, Trivago, Airbnb, and Booking.com came up again and again. We see two reasons behind this. (1) The travel market was one of the earliest sectors to fully move online; (2) B2C, two-sided marketplaces (travellers ↔ hotels/hosts/airlines) are actually a great training ground for future CPOs, as those environments mean learning to run large-scale experiments, navigate complex supply and demand dynamics, and drive international growth.
What about earlier-stage but fast-scaling companies? They make up just 2% of the total. The other 98% come from more established, mature organizations. And honestly, that makes sense. Scale sustains output, and a 30-year-old giant like Amazon will naturally produce more product leaders over time than a 20-year-old company like Klarna.
Which companies produce the most product leaders per 10,000 FTEs?
That’s exactly why we looked beyond volume and measured the relative efficiency of feeder companies. We focused on companies with at least 10,000 FTEs and calculated how many product alumni they’ve produced per 10,000 employees.
The leaderboard looks very different now, as 65% of the top spots are occupied by more recent mature tech players like Zalando, Spotify, Lazada, and Delivery Hero. But in this ranking, eBay stands out as the most efficient training ground, producing more CPOs and CPTOs per employee than any other company on the list.
If you also consider our earlier example, Amazon has around 1.5M FTEs (even when you take out 1M Ops people, it still doesn't make the top 20), while Klarna has about 4.7K. Amazon has 133 CPO/CPTO alumni; Klarna has 3. In that case, the absolute scale favors Amazon. Yet, relative efficiency tilts to Klarna, as it produces ~2.2× more product leaders per 10,000 employees than Amazon. So, while fast-scaling companies might not stack up in volume today, they’re worth watching. As they scale, they could become serious feeder firms for the next wave of product leadership.
Which feeder firms create the most CPOs turned founders?
We identified 154 leaders who wear both a founder/co‑founder hat and a CPO/CPTO title. When you look at their career histories, the same big tech giants pop up (Microsoft, Amazon, Google), alongside travel or marketplace specialists (Trivago, Expedia, Uber, Delivery Hero).
In that group, Microsoft is clearly the best school for entrepreneurial product executives. Of the 85 product alumni we tracked from Microsoft, 26% founded a company. But maybe that’s not so surprising. Just look at Expedia, Zillow, Glassdoor, and OfferUp, all of which trace their roots back to Microsoft. Similarly, Microsoft Research Asia is often nicknamed the “West Point for Chinese premium tech talent,” and its alumni now lead companies such as ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent.
Also worth calling out: it's a good sign to have some companies on your resume, as they have pretty high shares of product alumni who founded their own ventures. Among them, you can find Lazada, Delivery Hero, and AOL with founder rates of 33%, 44%, and 57%, respectively. Conversely, while Amazon and eBay have large numbers of product alumni, they present founder rates of only ~6%.
Conclusion: Which companies are the best schools for future CPOs/CPTOs?
Big tech companies top the charts when it comes to producing the most CPOs, CPTOs, and founder-type product leaders. They operate at massive scales and have had decades to build and shape deep product talent benches.
But newer mature tech companies shouldn’t be overlooked. When you normalize for size, many of them are actually more efficient training environments and produce more product leaders per employee. Similarly, fast-scaling companies are still growing rapidly and are continuously adding to their product teams, potentially creating the next wave of product alumni.
We also noticed that most of today’s product leaders come out of B2C marketplace businesses. B2B SaaS is a younger category, while B2C sectors like travel went digital much earlier, giving them a head start in building and exporting product talent.
For now, scale matters, but as today’s high-growth players mature, you might be tempted soon to look for their names on resumes, as the next generation of product leadership could be coming straight from their benches.
If this kind of mapping speaks to you, if you're curious how we built it, or if you're hiring a product leader, let's talk. 🙂 learco@thebigsearch.com