A Chief of Staff is a senior generalist who sits one level below the CEO or founder, but works across every function instead of owning just one. The role exists to solve a real bottleneck: as a company grows past a certain size, a founder simply cannot personally track every project, every fire, and every cross-team dependency — a Chief of Staff becomes the person who does that tracking, translates the founder’s priorities into an actual execution plan, and follows up until things are done.

Day to day, this can mean running the weekly leadership meeting, owning a specific high-stakes project the founder doesn’t have bandwidth for, drafting board materials, or quietly resolving a conflict between two department heads before it escalates. It is deliberately not a narrow job description — the mandate shifts based on whatever the company’s biggest gap is that quarter, which is exactly why the role tends to attract sharp generalists rather than deep specialists.

Because it sits so close to leadership, Chief of Staff is often used as a fast-track into a more senior operating role — a strong Chief of Staff frequently moves into a VP or C-suite seat (commonly COO or a functional lead) within a few years, having already seen how every part of the business actually works.

🇵🇭 Philippine Example

As Philippine startups move past their earliest, all-hands-on-deck stage and start raising institutional funding, a growing number are creating a Chief of Staff role specifically to help a founder who is now splitting time between fundraising, hiring, and actually running the business — the same pattern seen in more mature startup ecosystems once a company scales past roughly 30-50 employees.

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