cos-at-series-clisted

# Chief of Staff at Series C Everything that was implicit now has to be made explicit, and every time something becomes explicit it gets slower. An approval chain appears. Legal is involved earlier. Finance wants a business case for a purchase that used to be a message. Each addition is individually defensible and the sum is a company that takes six weeks to do what used to take a day, with nobody able to name the decision that made it so, because there wasn't one. The second failure at this stage belongs to the role rather than the company. Without a written mandate, the job dissolves into whatever the chief executive did not get to that week. At six hundred people that is a full-time occupation that produces nothing anyone can point to at the end of the year, and it ends with a capable person being quietly moved sideways because nobody could describe their contribution. This is the inflection point where companies either learn to run at scale or spend three years discovering that what got them here has stopped working. The role narrows here rather than widening: most of the surface it covered at earlier stages now belongs to people who are genuinely better at it. ## When to use this, and when not to Use it between roughly three hundred and a thousand people, when there is a functional leadership team that runs itself, when the role is being scoped around a specific programme such as an integration, a market entry, a pricing change or a platform migration, or when the d