A COO's Unnamed Work Type #3: Founder Vault

Of the unnamed work that is emotional or interpersonal, there’s two types: the part that doesn't face founders, and the part that does. This is the category of unnamed work that is hardest to write about because its defining feature is privacy.

This is the work that happens when only the COO and the CEO (or COO and founders) are in the room. It resembles therapy, but it’s more about being a context-aware vault.

As a vault for confidential conversations, a founder gets a place to work things out by talking them through. They can talk about a personnel issue that can’t be discussed anywhere else, vent about another co-founder, or express personal doubts about the business or strategy.

One version of this came up when I interviewed a COO who runs founder “unload” sessions. The prompt for these sessions is “tell me everything you don’t like about what we’re all doing to your company.” Then they talk through that prompt, debating why it’s happened, and comes out aligned about what to do about those things.

Another thing that happens in private is positive feedback. It’s lonely to be a CEO and it’s exhausting to be a founder. You carry the weight of the company. People rarely say “good job.”¹¹ I wonder if that’s why some founders proxy their success onto things that aren’t really success: hype, valuation, event invitations, or other signals of cachet that aren’t always correlated with outcomes. They have to get signal from somewhere.

So often the COO takes on the responsibility of saying these things. I’ve seen and heard many versions of this, from specific “I see your improvement in X skill” (for example, public speaking), to general “I think that went really well” (for example, after a press interview, board meeting, or a big event) or even more simply: “I think you’re doing a good job.”

I have heard stories about a more dramatic type of “therapy” where a COO mediated founder disputes, but that didn’t come up directly in my interviews. Perhaps it’s so private it couldn’t be mentioned.

Of course many other people can play the role of vault: board members, investors, executive coaches, peer CEOs, spouses, or advisors. But the difference is that all of these people are outside the company. So getting detailed, gritty advice requires a founder or CEO to provide a large amount of context, which can be exhausting. It’s easier to turn to a COO.

Sometimes, what most defines the COO-CEO relationship is the work that is never visible, and never named.