In February 2020, I became Chief of Staff at Hugging Face.

We were ten people. By the time I left a year and a half later, we were forty-five, and I’d had a hand in hiring a lot of them.

A month in, COVID sent us fully remote, and all the hallway time with my CEO I’d been counting on to learn the job just vanished. A role that’s isolating on a good day got a lot lonelier. I was making calls that mattered, fast, with no one beside me who’d sat in the same seat.

So I went looking. I messaged more than a hundred

Chiefs of Staff on LinkedIn and asked each of them for fifteen minutes. I’d tuck those coffee chats between meetings just to talk to someone who’d done this longer than I had. Those conversations got me through that first year.

Then it flipped. Chiefs of Staff started reaching out to me, asking the same questions I’d been asking everyone else.

I loved it, but one chat at a time, I was only ever passing along a single perspective. What if I put all of us in one room instead? You wouldn’t get one answer, you’d get a hundred.

I thought people would come for the playbooks and the templates. Some do. But the thing that keeps them here is simpler than that: the relief of not being the only one, knowing someone else is up against the exact thing you are, that

you’re not doing this by yourself.

No Chief of Staff should have to go at this alone. It’s too high-stakes a role, too much time spent next to power with no one to process it with, to do without people who actually get it.

Ask a Chief of Staff is the room I wish I’d had.