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LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are of some of our recent editions.

🤵🏻‍♂️ So, What Does A Chief Of Staff Actually Do. The Pandora's Box of startup roles. We deep dive into the Chief of Staff.
🎙️ Bill Kerr Interview. Founder & CEO of Athyna - Brand, culture & global teams done well. 🌏
🫠 Neumannomics: A Deep Dive. Co-Founder & Ex-CEO at WeWork. How to build a cult, burn it the ground and buy it back again.

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ROUNDTABLE 🍀

How do you measure success in your role as Chief of Staff?

After the bunch of comments and praise we received on last week’s edition: So, What Does A Chief Of Staff Actually Do, we decided to do a unfiltered version of one of questions in the interview. We're keeping it real this round, going straight to the Chiefs of Staff for the uncut version of how they measure success in their roles. Here’s what they told us.

Max Kausman - COS at Chronicle

For me, success hinges on three main factors. The amount of 'founders' time' saved, enabling them to concentrate on their 'Zone of Genius'—for example, designing the product vision—instead of spending time on other topics.

And finally, achieving operational excellence, where various operational topics on finance, legal, people & culture etc. are set to 'on autopilot' and do not require the founders' attention.

And finally, achieving operational excellence, where various operational topics on finance, legal, people & culture etc. are set to 'on autopilot' and do not require the founders' attention.

Albert Patajo - COS at Nexl

My measure of success is broadly the same measures that the company is measured on—value creation across growth and profitability. When I joined Nexl, I had the ultimate baptism by fire and was tasked to lead and manage our Series A fundraise. In one of the hardest fundraising environments too! We managed to close a Series A with two great Australian investors—Shearwater and EVP—who have just incredible conviction in the problem space we’re playing in and the platform we’ve built.

Katie Noonan - COS at Forage

Measuring success in the Chief of Staff role can be difficult and ultimately is often down to perception of the principal that you work with. It can be measured through the successful and seamless delivery of projects, the incisive advice or direct feedback you provide to your principal and executive team and your ability to navigate challenging and ambiguous situations with limited supervision.

One of the achievements I'm proud of is that in challenging macro-economic conditions we have maintained a strong internal culture. Our annual engagement survey results showed significant improvement in our focus areas of collaboration and innovation which I focused on throughout the year.

Beatriz Guevara - COS at Athyna

At the end of the day, success in my role is about making impact and being a trusted ally to my CEO and my team.

💡 Note: If you are looking to hire an EA, Chief of Staff, or any other remote role for that matter, my startup Athyna can help.

Jo Robyn - COS at Black Nova Venture Capital

I see it as my number one goal to create leverage for our partners' time. This is measured by taking things off their plate and owning respective parts of the business that they were previously managing. We set annual and quarterly goals, and I assess our success by whether we executed against them with the tactics we planned or if we need to revisit and adjust the goals, lightening our load when necessary for course correction.

Other goals include Coaching NPS, the number of founder-focused events we run or host that are topics generated by and add value to the portfolio—not just ones we assume are important—streamlining a number of our internal processes, and launching our first set of playbooks, for which I measure success by piloting and testing with our portfolio.

Maddi Ingham - COS at Verve

For me, success is based on how much the co-founders trust me to have their backs and manage critical tasks. An achievement I am most proud of recently would be being the parental leave cover for our CEO, COO and CMO while also managing the M&A process for our recent acquisition.

Belen Wagaw - COS at SAP

Working for someone who led an organization of 19 thousand people, there were many escalations—my job was to resolve the ones I could, delegate the ones I couldn’t and raise the alarm for the one that needed my exec’s attention.

And that's it! You can also go ahead and read our previous edition on the role of Chief of Staff here.

TWEET OF THE WEEK 🐣 

This guy builds robots for a living and just raised $675M from Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, Nvidia and more. High believability rating.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠

Jon Stewart dropped some political commentary around AI recently and well, you could say … it was rather bearish. Although I am bullish on AI and technology in general I think it’s always good to hear the opposing point of view.

Otherwise we all just end up passing round the crack pipe of technological viagra after all.

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we use inside of our businesses. Today we are highlighting Deel — the only HR platform with everything you need, for everyone. EOR, contractor management, immigration and more.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

Here are the options I have for us to work together. If any of them are interesting to you - hit me up!

🌏 Hiring global talent: Check out my startup Athyna.
🧰 Want to outperform the competition: See our suite of tools & resources.
👀 Reach thousands of tech leaders: Advertise with us here.

And that’s it from me. See you next week. 🫡