Should I hire a Chief of Staff? A founder’s guide

The Chief of Staff role is more prominent than ever before in the technology industry. Across our portfolio and daily conversations with founders and operators, it’s clear that demand for the role is high from both sides of the table.

The Chief of Staff (CoS) role defies easy definition. Responsibilities shift dramatically depending on the industry and company size. As a result, we regularly hear founders asking the same questions: 

• Do I need a Chief of Staff? (Part one – below) 
• What qualities should I look for in a Chief of Staff? (Part two)
• How should I hire for this role? (Part three)

This blog series has been designed to help founders answer these three questions, with insights from two people who know this hire from different angles: 

Leah Sutton is Balderton’s Chief Portfolio Talent Officer. She works directly with portfolio founders on hiring and scaling their leadership teams, and has supported many through the CoS search process. 

Emma Kerr is Chief of Staff to Bernard Liautaud, Balderton’s Managing Partner, and brings first-hand experience of the role from the inside.

How do I know if I need a Chief of Staff?

Before jumping on the Chief of Staff bandwagon, the most important question is whether this is actually the right hire for your business right now. The answer depends entirely on the problems you are facing. 

As Leah puts it: “The first thing I ask a founder who comes to me saying they need a Chief of Staff is: What are you solving for? What’s the work that needs to get done, and what will give you the most leverage?”

It’s important to be clear about what you’d like to move off your plate. 

Before reaching for a job spec, do a quick audit of where your time is going. Ask yourself:

• Are you regularly doing work that someone else could do with the right context?
• Are you the bottleneck; do things stall because they need you specifically, or because the team lacks bandwidth generally?
• Are cross-functional projects stalling because nobody owns them?
• Is there sensitive work, such as board prep, investor relations or people decisions  that you can’t hand to anyone currently?

Depending on the above, you might want to think about whether a Chief of Staff, Founder’s Associate, or Executive Assistant is the right choice. 

Start by working through the following diagram to identify which hire will give you the most leverage right now.

Executive Assistant (EA) – if your problem is administrative, an EA is the right hire. They manage the logistics of your time: calendar, travel, inbox. If your CoS is spending more than 20% of their time on admin tasks, consider hiring an EA or using a virtual EA or AI-enabled tool to fill that gap.

Founder’s Associate (FA) – if you’re a small, early stage company and you need execution over strategy, a FA is often the more suitable hire. They are early-career generalists who get things done across multiple areas, such as market research, deck editing or financial modelling, without a defined brief.

Chief of Staff – if most of your problems point to cross-functional work, governance, strategy or acting as your right hand, a CoS is the right decision. 

So, what does a Chief of Staff do? 

Defining the CoS role is not straightforward. If you ask ten founders what their CoS does, you will get ten different answers. This is what makes the role uniquely exciting. The CoS role can be one of the most powerful hires a founder can make. 

At its core, the CoS is the CEO’s right hand. They are an additional pair of hands for everything on your plate, someone who effectively doubles what you can get done. They don’t just facilitate, they take ownership and run things end to end. 

Two things make the role distinctive: 

• First, the CoS unblocks the founder. When the founder is the bottleneck, the CoS takes ownership and keeps things moving. 
• Second, they act as a shepherd, keeping the CEO focused on high-signal, high-conviction work and reducing noise. 

What does a Chief of Staff do at each stage of company growth?

The CoS role looks very different depending on the size and complexity of the business. 

Early stage (1-10 people)

A Founder’s Associate is often the more suitable hire. A CoS at this stage can be premature and expensive without enough structural complexity to justify the seniority.

Growing organisation (10-50 people)

This is where a CoS becomes genuinely transformative. The founder is increasingly the bottleneck and the CoS effectively doubles their capacity. Responsibilities at this stage include preparing board materials and investor updates, owning cross-functional initiatives, establishing OKRs, supporting hiring, and setting up AI workflows and automation.

Scaling Organisation (50-150)

As functional leaders are hired, the CoS shifts from supporting the CEO to enabling the whole leadership team. Leah describes the CoS at this stage as an incubator: “They will often build a function from scratch, identifying the need, setting up the processes and running it, until the company is big enough to hire a dedicated leader.” She has seen this play out repeatedly across the portfolio: a CoS joins at 50 people and over two to three years incubates finance operations, revenue ops and people functions before each is handed to a dedicated hire.

At scale – 150+ people

The CoS operates across the whole organisation. Responsibilities include representing the CEO in senior external conversations, owning organisation-wide strategic initiatives, and supporting the CEO on board relationships and governance. At this stage, other functional leaders such as a CTO, CPO or CFO may also bring in their own CoS.

Are you willing to give this person visibility and authority? 

A CoS will only be as effective as the access and authority you are willing to give them. They need a seat at the table from day one, not just proximity to the CEO, but real visibility and real authority. Without that, the role becomes an extra layer of coordination rather than a genuine extension of your reach.

Before you open the role, ask yourself one final question: If I hire this person, what specific decisions will they make that I currently make? If you cannot answer that clearly, you are not ready to hire yet.

It’s also important to be upfront with your existing team before you open the role. A common problem is hiring a CoS without consulting them first, and within weeks there is confusion about who owns what.