The role varies widely. Typically, there is a lot of administrative work required to manage the cadence of an exec team: Examples - collecting tracking metrics ahead of meeting, tracking action items for completion, preparing materials for customer briefings, etc. A chief of staff helps the CEO get higher output by letting them focus on the decisions and not the process.

My understanding: a masculine term for "executive assistant". Or: a technical secretary. Personal project manager.

This article from First Round Capital outlines the modern tech company approach: http://firstround.com/review/why-you-need-two-chiefs-in-the-...

Tl;dr - CoS stands in for the CEO in meetings, fills her in on what's going on across the organization (or outside of it), and overall leverages her time. It's beyond someone who just does scheduling but short of being COO, which entails direct reports and accountability.

I guess. That squares with Pooja Ashok's resume, too.

As in the classic British "secretary" when it was a job for men named Hilary or Dana

At my previous company, where raising money and making sense of accounting was a non-trivial, the Chief of Staff was (like the CEO and the CFO) a former investment banker for +10 years. He definitely felt like the #2 of the company (ex-aequo with CTO & CFO) and not an executive assistant.

In practice, he was in charge of internal communication with non CxO people and the CEO, and a lot of things that the CEO had to do that wasn’t direction external relations (typically press): preparing financial documents, coordinating teams with legal, team morale, etc.

Person who manages budgets, day-to-day, organizational specific priorities, tracking higher level objectives, etc. Its basically a high level Program/Project Manager with a horizontal responsibility.