The first episode
This is the first episode of Front Office. Erin Liao is the chief of staff at Helix Bio, a Cambridge biotech. She built the role from nothing — there was no chief of staff at Helix when she started — and she has now run it through several inflection points in the company's growth: early financings, senior hires, a meaningful expansion of the headquarters, and the long, quiet stretches in between.
The conversation is intentionally a long one. It is not about Helix. It is about the craft. What it actually is. What it isn't. And why almost nobody who does it writes anything down.
"The hardest thing about this craft is that you cannot describe it without sounding either grandiose or boring. The work is neither. The work is precise."
What the work actually is
Erin gives a definition that surprises the host. "The chief of staff is the operator who can carry the founder's attention across surfaces faster than the surfaces can recompose themselves," she says. "Every other definition is a special case."
She elaborates. The founder's attention is the company's most expensive asset. Every meeting, every email, every Slack message is competing for it. The chief of staff is the operator whose job is to compress that attention — to take a fragmented founder calendar and produce a coherent operating week. To take a fragmented board update and produce a coherent investor relationship. To take a fragmented offsite agenda and produce a coherent executive team. "The compression is the craft," she says. "The compression is what the founder is paying for."
What the work isn't
It is not, Erin says, an executive assistant role plus more. It is not an operations role minus the team. It is not a junior founder role on a track to becoming a real founder. Those are three different things. They have three different operating disciplines. They have three different career arcs. Conflating them is the most common mistake she sees when she interviews potential successors.
"The chief of staff who thinks the job is EA-plus will eventually quit because she feels under-titled," she says. "The chief of staff who thinks the job is ops-minus will eventually quit because she feels under-resourced. The chief of staff who thinks the job is junior-founder will eventually quit because she'll realize she's not the founder. All three quits are predictable, and all three are about the same thing: a misunderstanding of what the role actually is."
"This job is not a stepping-stone. It is a craft. The arc is to get better at the craft, not to leave it."
Why nobody writes about it
The closer of the episode is a long answer to a short question. Why doesn't this craft have a literature?
"Three reasons," Erin says. "One: the discretion. The job is built on not talking about the things we know. Writing about it cuts against the load-bearing instinct of the role. Two: the audience. The people who would read the literature are the people who would write the literature, and there are not very many of us. Three: the time. The job consumes the kind of time that, if it weren't being spent on the job, would be the kind of time you spend writing. The craft consumes its own documentation."
"This podcast is an attempt to chip away at the third one," she says. "Forty minutes at a time."
What she'd outsource
"The thing I want most is a vendor who could handle the operating choreography of every founder trip — every car, every greeter, every hotel coordination, every flight handler — as a single layer," Erin says. "I currently do this myself. I have done it for nineteen months. It is the single largest consumer of my Sunday evenings. It does not exist as a vendor. It should."
Topics covered
- What the chief-of-staff role actually is — a definition that surprises
- The three career mistakes that produce predictable quits
- Why the craft does not have a literature
- What forty minutes a week, for fifty weeks, might begin to change