According to Mark Schmulen, an entrepreneur never has enough hours in a day.

That may be why a pal who leads a start-up once expressed the desire to clone himself to Schmulen, co-CEO of NutshellMail, a Houston-based company that offers a free service that manages users' e-mail and social networking accounts through any existing e-mail account. But while cloning might help with time management, Schmulen says it wouldn’t necessarily improve the business.

“I responded by telling him the last thing he needed was another person with the same skills and personality. Instead, he needs someone to compensate for his own weaknesses,” says Schmulen. “Having two of the same types of people as leaders doesn’t really buy you anything.The only reason to do that is because you don’t have enough hours in day, and to help with that you can just hire managers.”

That’s why he and co-CEO David Lyman decided to share the executive leadership role.

Schmulen studied international relations and economics at the University of Pennsylvania and was an investment banking analyst for JP Morgan Chase. Lyman earned a degree in computer and telecommunications engineering and worked as an IT consultant for Accenture. Shortly after founding NutshellMail, the two men split their responsibilities between technical- and business-oriented tasks. Schmulen focuses on finance, investor relations, marketing, customer support and business development, while Lyman handles project management and all technical issues and relationships.

The two rarely get involved in each other’s respective areas of expertise, says Schmulen. “We worked more closely together at first to give each other a grounding in each other’s backgrounds, but now that’s there is so much more to do, the guy closest to the actual execution typically handles a given decision.”

Entrepreneurs with strong engineering backgrounds often lack the business experience to raise money, create business opportunities and manage employees, says Schmulen, while those with limited technical backgrounds must depend on employees or contractors to develop and support products. “This creates problems if they do not share in the founder's commitment,” he says.

While many companies recognize the need for a combination of technical and business chops at the senior management level, a more common model is for business-oriented types to run the business while techies serve in roles such as chief technology officer. That’s essentially what happened at Google, where co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin brought in former Novell CEO Eric Schmidt as chairman of the board and CEO in 2001, says Kevin Maney, a contributing editor at Conde Nast Portfolio and blogger for Portfolio.com.

Page serves as president of Products, and Brin is president of Technology. Yet Page and Brin work so closely with Schmidt, says Maney, that Google essentially has “de facto co-CEOs.”

Co-CEO situations like the one at NutshellMail can work well at young companies where two people possess skills that complement each other, get along well personally and enjoy working together, says Maney. The model generally doesn’t work as well at larger, well established companies where two executives are brought together not because of any particular synergy but because it’s seen as a strategic business move.

“At bigger companies, co-CEOs are probably involved in some kind of a marriage of convenience. So the danger there is that they won’t work together well and will have opposing styles,” Maney says.

At Motorola, for example, Sanjay Jha was appointed co-CEO in August because the company hoped to spin off its wireless handset division into a separate company, says Rick Franklin, a telecommunications analyst for Edward Jones. The idea was that Jha, Qualcomm’s former chief operating officer, would share the CEO title and responsibilities with Greg Brown until a spinoff, at which time Jha would lead the handset division and Brown would handle everything else. Since then, however, the planned spinoff of the underperforming handset division has been put on hold.

While recruiting Jha was a “huge coup for Motorola,” says Franklin, “Motorola is paying him handsomely and Mr. Jha will be lucratively compensated even without a successful turnaround of Motorola's handset division.” It may be too soon to tell if the combined leadership role will help or hurt Motorola or be immaterial to the company’s fortunes, but Maney doesn’t believe Motorola would have hired Jha if it knew a spinoff wouldn’t happen.

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