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The story
What Katy is looking for
Operating partner to a founder or CEO at the moment the company outgrows its own operating system. That's the seat I've held before: Chief of Staff to the CTO at Parity, working across 17 teams in a 300-person organisation, and the seat I've built from nothing, joining a venture studio as employee #1. The work I'm best at sits between functions: diagnosing what's actually broken, building the planning and decision cadence around leadership, and taking ownership of the problems that don't have a natural owner. The ideal is a company just past a raise, with real ambition and no operating layer yet, and a leader who wants a counterpart they can hand things to completely, including the sensitive things. What I'm not looking for is a commercial role with a Chief of Staff title; I've learned to tell the difference.
Why Katy is exploring
The venture studio I helped build from inception raised short of its target and refocused on engineering services, a sound decision for the business, and a natural endpoint for my role in it. I'm treating this search deliberately rather than moving to whatever's adjacent, because the last few years taught me exactly where I do my best work: beside a decision-maker, in ambiguity, with a broad remit. The other factor is that I've spent the past year building and operating my own AI agent infrastructure, and it has fundamentally changed my view of what a single senior operator can carry. I want to apply that inside a company that's moving fast enough to need it.
What won't fit on a resume
The pattern behind the bullet points: I diagnose before I build. At Parity I interviewed 120 people across every function and level in my first three weeks — before proposing anything — and the strategy that came out of it went to the founder. I've handled the work that requires discretion: compensation, restructuring, crisis situations, the conversations that never appear in a deck. I've recruited fifteen founders out of established executive careers, which is a different order of persuasion than selling a product. And the "AI-native" line on my resume is operational fact, not positioning: I run my own work through an agent system I built, and when I doubted its output, I audited it, 1,115 cases, a 94% false-positive rate found, the architecture rebuilt. I hold my own tools to the standard I'd hold a team's.
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