What's a Chief of Staff?

“I wanna become a Chief of Staff” has been a common statement across lots of people I know. And rightfully so – it’s one of the most exciting roles on the market, particularly if you have many interests and enjoy solving problems.

The role unites being a “firefighter-in-chief”, an orchestra conductor of company processes, and a mirror image of the CEO.

In this article, we want to dig in where the role came from, why it’s important, and how you become one. Let’s go.

A brief history

The title "Chief of Staff" didn't start in a Silicon Valley office, as one may think, but on a battlefield.

Militaries have used the role for centuries, and the idea was simple: generals are often brilliant at strategy, terrible at logistics. Someone needed to translate their vision into prompt execution, manage information flow, and make sure the right people were in the right positions. That someone was the Chief of Staff.

One of the earliest known references to the Chief of Staff role in the military can be found during the Napoleonic era in the early 19th century. Napoleon Bonaparte appointed Louis-Alexandre Berthier as his Chief of Staff, setting a precedent for the critical position that would later become an integral part of military command structures.

As well known, Napoleon's genius was speed of decision, as he could read a battlefield faster than anyone alive. But a battle has ten thousand moving parts, and without someone managing that information architecture, his decisions would've been brilliant but useless. Berthier was essentially his operating system, and after losing at Waterloo, Napoleon said "If Berthier had been there, I would not have met this misfortune.” (https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/louis-alexandre-berthier).

The Prussian military eventually formalized this further: they created the Generalstab (General Staff) in the 19th century precisely because they realized that genius commanders were a liability if the system depended entirely on one person's judgment. The Chief of Staff became an institutional role that was designed to make the organization smarter, not just the leader.

Overall, the military had solved how to make a single mind's vision survive contact with a complex organization. The question was whether that solution only worked on a battlefield, or whether it was describing something more universal (spoiler: it did).

Over time, this role has evolved to encompass a broader spectrum of responsibilities, and it was clear that executing a single person vision needed more than just a team following blunt orders. The easiest example is the White House Chief of Staff, which is one of the most powerful positions in American government, and it’s essentially the person who decides what gets to the President's desk and what doesn't.

Eventually, the role made its way into the corporate world. For a long time, it solely remained a role easily placeable in a big company, with a complex organizational structure, helping out an overwhelmed CEO.

What it has become

Today, the Chief of Staff role exists everywhere, from 10-person startups to 10,000-person company, and the title has evolved with it. In a large organization, a CoS is often an experienced operator and part of the C-Level: someone who manages the CEO's priorities, aligns the leadership team, owns the OKRs process, drives strategic initiatives, and acts as a communication layer between the executive and the rest of the company. Someone that does everything, everywhere.

In a startup, it looks a bit different. It's even messier, more hands-on, more fluid (but still more experienced than entry roles). The through-line is always the same though: make the leader(s) more effective in their vision.

What's interesting is that the role has become a catch-all for "high-leverage generalist work that doesn't fit anywhere else.", which is both its biggest strength but also the reason why it's so poorly understood.

You'd think that with better tools, better communication platforms, and flatter organizational structures, the need for a CoS would disappear. It hasn't, because, as companies scale, complexity grows faster than headcount. A CEO who could manage everything at 10 people cannot manage everything at 100. The decisions get harder and the context required to make good calls explodes, someone needs to absorb that complexity so the CEO doesn't have to carry it alone.

Just like in the military, someone needs to ensure that the CEO’s vision survives contact with the organization.

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Chief of Staff vs. Founder's Associate: what's the difference?

Those two positions exist on a blurry spectrum. This is our best attempt at distinction:

• A Founder's Associate is typically an early-career role, scoped around a founder at a pre-seed or seed stage startup. The focus is operational execution: get things done, remove friction, cover gaps, it's a high-speed apprenticeship in how to build a company from scratch.
• A Chief of Staff is a more senior position, and it scales with the organization. Where a FA is about doing, a CoS is more about orchestrating. You're not just executing tasks, you're shaping how the company runs, aligning teams, translating strategy into action, and acting as an extension of the executive's judgment. A CoS might also step in ad interim for a leadership position.

The two roles aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, Founder's Associate is one of the best pipelines into a Chief of Staff position.

What skills do you need to be a great CoS?

You need to understand the business deeply enough to make judgment calls without having to ask every time, and that is called strategic thinking. Without it, every task that needs to get done will need proofreading, reformatting, and constantly going back to the baseline.

Other than that, you will often be the translation layer between the executive and the team, and between the company and the outside world, meaning that your communication will be crucial (up, down and sideways). Without it, your execution will be ambiguous and unclear.

You also need to be able to keep moving despite priorities shifting, schedules getting messed up and fast context-switching. No day will ever be the same to the previous one, and your operational range will be incredibly broad, as you’ll need to learn and apply faster than anyone else.

But you won’t be alone, as much of the role is about people and dynamics: reading rooms, managing relationships, knowing when to push, and knowing when to let things be for a while.

Lastly, remember that the CoS is the last line of defense before the CEO. So it’s your job to solve problems before they hit the CEO’s desk – which makes the ability to do so innately important for the role.

How do you become one?

There's no single path, but there are a few that come up again and again.

The most common is working your way up from inside the company, starting as a Founder's Associate, a Strategy & Operations lead, or a senior IC who's already operating at an executive level. If you've been the person the founder calls when something important needs to happen, you might already be doing the job without having the title.

The second path is coming in from the outside, typically from consulting, VC, or banking, where you've built the skills that matter: structured thinking, executive communication, fast context-switching.

And well, there’s a third path to becoming a Chief of Staff: Generalyst.

Applytoday. We work with top startups from Germany and Europe to help them find the right Founder’s Associates for them.

See 10-20 companies within 4 weeks, get your first introductions within 24h of being accepted into the program, and we’ll help you navigate the journey.

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