When I was at London Business School, I knew I wanted to move closer to the real mechanics of how companies grow. I had started my career in investment banking, which gave me a strong analytical toolkit, but I was increasingly more interested in what sat behind the model. What does it actually take to improve a P&L? What does a growth plan, market launch or cost programme look like once you are inside the business rather than advising from the outside?
Like many MBA students, I did not have a perfectly mapped plan. I was exploring. If that feels familiar, you are in good company.
For me, one of the biggest values of LBS was the white space to think, in a more curated environment, about what I wanted next. Before business school, my professional world had become quite narrow: bankers, consultants, lawyers, all working long hours and often heading into similarly structured post-MBA paths. LBS gave me the space, network and experimentation ground to explore a different route.
Today, I am Chief of Staff to the CEO at Marshmallow (series C unicorn insurtech). It is one of the most leveraged and least standardised roles I have seen in a scaling company. For LBS students considering startup, operator or founder-track careers, it is worth understanding properly.
What is a Chief of Staff?
At its core, a Chief of Staff is a generalist operator who helps a CEO translate priorities into execution.
In later-stage companies, the role often acts as an amplifier of the CEO’s time and attention. A good Chief of Staff helps the CEO focus on the highest-value decisions, while ensuring that the most important cross-functional work actually moves.
That said, the title can be misleading. “Chief of Staff” is not a standard job description. In one company, it may look like a strategic operator or proxy to the CEO. In another, it may sit closer to a highly capable coordination role, sometimes overlapping with a Founder’s Associate or Executive Assistant. I have even had people assume it is a People team role. In practice, most Chief of Staff positions sit somewhere in between.
This is why it is important not to optimise for the title alone. Optimise for the scope, the principal you work for, and the types of problems you will be trusted to solve.
Why do CEOs hire Chiefs of Staff?
As startups scale, complexity compounds. There are more functions, more decisions, more interdependencies and usually more distance between leadership and the reality on the ground.
That is where a strong Chief of Staff becomes useful.
The role often works as the glue across the organisation. You are one of the few people whose job is to see across functions, understand where priorities collide, and help drive progress on the CEO’s highest-priority issues. In practice, that can mean anything from market expansion and product adjacency work to cost discipline, AI adoption or operational efficiency.
The value is not just analytical horsepower. It is context integration. A good Chief of Staff does not only ask what should happen. They also ask how a decision will land, what resistance it may trigger, and what needs to happen to make it executable.
In my own role, that has ranged from revenue expansion work, such as evaluating new geographies and product opportunities, to transformation work, particularly around how AI can improve internal operations. The common thread is not the topic itself. It is helping the organisation move on the issues that matter most.
How does the role evolve as startups scale?
At earlier stages, the role is often more fluid. There may be more ad hoc problem-solving, more founder shadowing and more willingness to let a smart generalist pick up whatever is most urgent.
As companies mature, the role usually becomes more cross-functional and organisational. The challenge becomes less about doing a single project and more about helping the company execute through complexity.
This is where one of the hardest parts of the role emerges: influence without formal authority.
A distinction that has stayed with me is the difference between rank and authority. Rank is your formal position. Authority is the trust people give you. A Chief of Staff may have enough rank to enter a situation on behalf of the CEO, but not enough authority to make people follow willingly. That authority has to be earned.
In practice, this means the role is fundamentally a people role. It is not enough to have the right analysis. You need to know how to land a message, build trust, and move a group of people through change without creating unnecessary resistance.
That is also why some of the most important CoS skills look less like hard skills and more like organisational behaviour: judgment, calibration, communication and stakeholder management.
How can MBA students get a Chief of Staff role?
The encouraging news is that MBAs are often better prepared for this role than they think. The analytical training helps. Structured problem solving helps. Organisational behaviour matters more than many people realise. It is a role built for strong generalists with sound judgment and high EQ.
The less encouraging news is that you do not become effective in this role through theory alone. You need reps.
I did not step straight into a Chief of Staff role after LBS, even though I wanted to. In hindsight, that was probably useful. The roles I took instead gave me many of the same building blocks: working closely with senior leaders, solving cross-functional problems, and operating across strategy, finance and execution.
That is the mindset I would encourage current students to take. If you do not land a Chief of Staff title immediately, do not assume the path is closed. Look instead for roles that give you:
- exposure to the CEO, COO or senior leadership team
- ownership of important business problems
- room to move across functions
- opportunities to build judgment, not just produce analysis
Titles such as strategy manager, business operations, corporate finance, special projects or founder’s office can all be credible stepping stones if the underlying scope is right.
One other lesson from my own path is that side hustles and visible initiative can matter more than you think. During LBS, I started the Ride It Out podcast during COVID when traditional startup networking had largely shut down. It was a practical way to create my own channel into the ecosystem. I also created the Founders Book after a VC friend pointed out that LBS startup activity was real but fragmented, even though students, founders, mentors and angels would all benefit from seeing that ecosystem in one place. Both projects were useful to the community, but they also helped me stand out. In crowded markets, signals of curiosity, initiative and follow-through can be real differentiators.
For students earlier in their careers (MiM, MAM, MiF, MFA), the same principle applies. You may not be hired as a Chief of Staff on day one, but you can absolutely start building the raw ingredients.
Choosing the right company matters as much as landing the role
One practical point that is easy to overlook: not all Chief of Staff roles are created equal, because not all companies are. If you are joining a startup or scale-up, assess it with the same seriousness an investor would. What market is it in? How defensible is the product? Who are the competitors? Do customers genuinely need it, or is it a nice-to-have? How much runway does the company have? What are the founder’s strengths and blind spots?
You are effectively investing your time, energy and career capital. Unlike a VC fund, you cannot hedge across a portfolio and hope one unicorn makes up for the rest. You only get one job at a time, so the downside of getting it wrong is much more concentrated. Treat that decision with at least as much rigour as an investor would.
What happens after Chief of Staff?
MBA students are right to think about optionality. One of the strengths of a good Chief of Staff role is that it usually expands it.
The role can act as a pressure cooker for leadership maturity. You get unusually high exposure to decision-making, pace, ambiguity, trade-offs and executive communication. Used well, that can become a strong platform for a number of paths: COO or business leadership roles, strategy or transformation leadership, founding a company, or moving into operator seats in VC or PE-backed environments.
The exact exit path depends on the type of CoS role you had and which muscles you built. But in general, it is a role that can open doors rather than close them.
Common misconceptions
The first misconception is that the role is glamorous. Sometimes it is. Often it is simply demanding. You are close to decision-making, but you are also close to ambiguity, politics and pressure.
The second is that the role is just a dressed-up Executive Assistant position. It is not. The best roles are strategic, cross-functional and execution-heavy, even if they sometimes involve coordination as part of the job.
The third is that the role is about being the smartest person in the room. It is not. It is about helping the room work better.
The fourth is that AI will make the role obsolete. I do not see that. AI will absolutely make parts of the job faster, especially analysis, drafting and synthesis. But the essence of the role remains deeply human: aligning people, building trust, reading context and helping organisations execute through complexity.
Final thought
If you are an LBS student considering this path, my main advice is not to be intimidated by the ambiguity. Many of the best post-MBA roles are not neatly packaged. They are shaped by the problems a company needs solved and the trust you can earn.
The Chief of Staff role can be an extraordinary seat from which to learn how companies really work. But it is not just a title to collect. It is a craft to develop.
And if you are still figuring out whether you want to be a founder, investor or operator, that is fine too. I was in your shoes not that long ago.
I am also putting together a more detailed Chief of Staff guide, aimed at LBS students and early-career operators, which will go deeper on what the role is, how to land it after LBS, and the most common exit paths. It will also include perspectives from other Chief of Staff alumni voices across the tech industry, so stay tuned.
If useful in the meantime, I have also spoken about the role on two recent LBS podcasts with the Tech & Media Club (listen here) and the Student Association (watch here).
Kathryn Larin is LBS MBA (2021) alumni, Dean’s Award recipient, and Chief of Staff to the CEO at Marshmallow, a Series C insurtech unicorn. Prior to this, she spent a decade in investment banking at Bank of America and Evercore, and held strategy and finance roles in high-growth tech companies.