The Co-CEOs the DOJ Couldn't Break
Most leadership advice gets tested in a conference room. Ours got tested in a federal courtroom.
We’ve never told this story publicly. For a long time, staying quiet was a deliberate choice. Recently Next Jump Co-CEO's Charlie Kim and Meghan Messenger sat down for their first-ever podcast, The Dov Baron Show with Dov Baron.
Here’s how Dov opened the episode, exactly as it aired:
"What if the organization that has trained more leaders than almost anyone alive, the one that Harvard studies and made required reading for newly promoted generals and Admirals, the CIA, the Navy, the Air Force, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, all came to for their leadership development, has never once advertised, never raised a dollar from venture capitalists, operated entirely on stealth mode for almost 2 decades?
And what if the reason you've never heard of them is deliberate?
Wait for this. This is an incredible story.
What if the United States Department of Justice just spent 32 months, 40 federal agents, and two full criminal jury trials trying to destroy them, and then the government lost in less than six hours?
And what if this is the first podcast they've ever agreed to sit down for?
Not by choice. They were forced out and decided that if they were going to come out, they were going to come out on their own terms.
It begins in Nigeria, where Charlie Kim grew up from the age of six inside a United Nations compound built to make Africa the producer of the world's food. His father is the world's most famous corn scientist, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times. That childhood and neighbors from 40 nations became the blueprint for everything he built thereafter.
The other half of the story begins in Boston where Meghan Messenger took a door-to-door sales job at 22 years old. When the dot-com bubble burst and her company fell from 150 employees to no more than four-- she was one of the ones who stayed. She did not know that one day she would testify as Co-CEO in a federal trial the government was certain it would win. She stayed anyway.
What they built over the next 30 years is unlike almost anything in American business.
Next Jump’s Perks at Work platform serves over 30 million employees across 54 countries.
Harvard's Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey named it as the leading example of Deliberately Developmental Organization where growth is the operating system itself.
Here's the strange part.
The Academy that trained those generals, Admirals and agency chiefs has run entirely pro-bono. Charlie and Meghan have been offered seven figure contracts to coach the heads of the Navy, the CIA, and they've never taken one of those contracts.
Then the Department of Justice came for them.
In 2024, prosecutors charged both of them with bribery and conspiracy over a Navy contract. They were debanked; their investors and employees were threatened and subpoenaed.
The Admiral at the center of it all, Robert Burke, was convicted of bribery in his own trial and is now serving six years.
However, Charlie and Meghan were tried for the other side of that transaction and they refused to plea.
They worked seven days a week, 958 days, running the exact leadership principles
they have spent three decades teaching.
The first trial was a hung jury, the 2nd lasted 3 weeks, and the jury returned a full acquittal on every charge for both of them in less than six hours.
They are now building the David and Goliath fund, turning their civil cases against the Navy and the DOJ into resources for ordinary people caught in the crosshairs of extraordinary power with no way of fighting back."
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