Hi founders and fellow VC Friends!
Each week we deliver one awesome person to your inbox. These are the people you need to know—the marketers, sales gurus, engineers, ops wizzes— who give your startup superpowers 🚀. The best part is, everyone is hireable on an interim basis.
Please meet Alex Aitchison, she’ll help you hire the right EA & Chief of Staff 🤩
Eight months ago, I hired my first EA. After discovering the power of EAs, I became obsessed with helping my portfolio founders and friends hire EAs.
In the process, I asked around for the best EA recruiting firm. Alex’s name kept coming up. Eventually, Patricia from Floodgate connected us (thanks Patricia!).
Alex is a founding member of Tack Advisors, a recruiting and career development firm that specializes in administrative roles. She leads biz dev and client strategy. Throughout her career, Alex has built and launched several communities including a community of 30K+ administrative professionals at Tack. Before building Tack, she was an early employee at Zesty (acquired by Square) and worked at Intercom.
Alex is trusted by first-time founders, seasoned executives, and several tier 1 VC funds for admin hiring and team building.
Fun fact about Alex: by the age of 11, she became a Certified Babysitter of California and had her own business cards. Early signs of success? ✅
You can hire her to recruit and develop your administrative team.
Need an EA or Chief of Staff? Reply to this email and I’ll connect you with Alex!
She was gracious enough to share some pro-tips with us here 🙏
A Chief of Staff is an extension of you
An outstanding Chief of Staff (CoS) is a strategic business partner. They can take calls and meetings on your behalf, collaborate with executive teams, and ensure your organization hits its quarterly OKRs. They can identify opportunities to optimize processes and remove organizational inefficiencies.
Why should CEOs hire a Chief of Staff? A strong Chief of Staff:
Gives you time back to focus on big-picture goals and needs
Stays on top of things and prevents small problems from escalating (think paying utilities and office rent)
Advocates and enforces company culture through training and development programs, recognition practices, and more
Time is your most valuable resource
An executive’s time is best spent doing the 1% that only they can do.
Unfortunately, most startups delay hiring people to help with smaller critical tasks like sorting through resumes and conducting initial interviews. This means your top talent (often you!) wastes precious time doing admin tasks that could be outsourced.
A CEO or executive of a growing company should always hand off admin tasks to a CoS or Executive Assistant.
If you don’t have time for deep work, team communications, and strategic planning, it may be time to hire an admin.
Clearly define what success looks like for a Chief of Staff
Chiefs of Staff are in high demand. A well-designed hiring process is critical to secure the right talent.
A strong hiring plan requires forethought and requires the following:
Clearly articulate expectations and what success looks like. Like any role, step one is to determine what success looks like. What do expect from your CoS? What’s the day-to-day of the role? When you interview, go beyond asking about just candidates’ skillset. Discuss openly your expectations with each potential hire.
Evaluate connection and communication style. Trust is key with your Chief of Staff. You need to trust them to be an extension of you. Develop a connection during the interview process and evaluate if you have compatible communication styles.
Guarantee success by investing in your Chief of Staff’s growth. Let your Chief of Staff know that you’re invested in their success. Offer leadership coaching and training as part of the role. Training pays dividends. It gives you leverage and helps you retain talent.
Want more tips on working with a CoS or EA? Check out Tack Advisor’s free webinar series.
Want an intro to Alex? Reply to this email and I’ll connect you!
As always, let me know if you have any questions and if you want an intro to any of the folks in this email (including the PS section 🎉).
Stay awesome,
Founder of Awesome People Ventures (join the syndicate here)
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Awesome People Continued 🚀
Most recent features
Michal is your comms, brand, & fundraising pro. He helps startups with fundraising narrative, messaging, and media relations. He can help you raise early-stage venture capital (pre-seed through Series B), define your product and brand voice, and show you how to get TechCrunch coverage.
Vicky is your content strategist. Most recently she helped start and launch Currant, a very cool food publication -- it’s a great blend of artsy, techy, and worldly. Over the course of her career, she’s led creative marketing campaigns for B2B and DTC companies
Katya is (also) your content strategist and copywriter. Most recently, Katya managed all of Tesla’s internal communications — everything from the internal website redesign, to company-wide emails, to employee onboarding.
Want intros to anyone here? Lmk and I’ll connect you!
Part-time opportunities
Want to make some extra $$$ and work on interesting projects? The Awesome People job board is filled with awesome flexible advising and consulting roles. They’re perfect for fun-employed folks, self-employed folks, and moonlighters!
Awesome People Bounty Board — Wagmi
We’re going FULL YOLO ✨🦄🚀
I just dropped a new bounty focused on NFTs and ERC-20 tokens for Awesome People. Here’s a sneak peek of the bounty:
As part of Awesome People, we want to spread love and joy in the startup community. I want to airdrop “thank yous” to members of the community for being awesome. As the owner of this bounty, you’ll have the freedom to explore and run with what you think is best. Here are some ideas that I’ve been thinking about:
An Awesome Person of the week NFT. You earn it by being helpful across the community. Maybe this changes weekly (even if that’s just a #) so there’s only ever one of a kind.
An Awesome Person community token to airdrop for making talent referrals, partnership referrals, and giving great advice to portfolio companies.
A series of NFTs that you earn by participating in things across the network. E.g. NFTs for sourcing, diligencing, and supporting companies — almost like levels and badges.
Check out the full bounty here.
PSA for Product Led Growth Cos 📣
Want to crush PLG? Yassss!!! One of my portfolio companies, Pocus, recently launched a new blog focused on PLG. It’s 🔥. Check out their latest post: The Account Executive 2.0: Account Executives at a PLG company. Garret Scott, the Head of Marketing & Demand Gen at Calendly, schools us on the role of AEs.
Pocus also just launched a product-led sales community with experts from Airtable, Calendly, Slack — you name it. They trade best practices on how to build/operate successful PLS teams, host AMAs, and plan PLS events. Interested in joining? Email alexa@pocus.com to request an invite.
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