[upbeat music] Hey, friend. It's David Nebinsky, the community lead here at the Chief of Staff Network.
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This episode was recorded at our Chief of Staff San Francisco Connect Conference in May 2025.
We were at such a beautiful venue that we decided to record the episode outside, so as such, there's a little bit of wind, so the audio is not as clean as prior episodes, but hopefully you understand, and hopefully it also makes you, uh, feel like you're coming along for a walk with us.
Um, to be a part of the Chief of Staff Connect Conference magic, you can learn more and join us in New York in October and in London in November. Hope to see you there.
Um, this episode is with Abhishek Vora, the chief of staff at LaunchDarkly.
In this episode, you'll learn about how Abhishek got his role, why he was interested in the chief of staff role, the types of projects he works on, AI, and how chiefs of staff are uniquely positioned to lead AI initiatives, and so much more.
So excited for you to level up as a chief of staff. Here we go with Abhishek. Abhishek, uh, to kinda tee things up, like, how would you say you got your chief of staff role? Yeah, that's a great question.
So this is, uh... Just to-- Let me introduce myself, maybe- [laughs]... to kick things off. Uh, my name's Abhishek. I am chief of staff to the CEO at LaunchDarkly.
Uh, my principal is Dan Rodgers, the CEO, uh, who formerly was CMO at ServiceNow under Frank Slootman. He was also formerly president, so number two, at Rubrik, another company that went public. Yeah.
Uh, and then he's also been VPs at Salesforce, AWS, Microsoft, et cetera, over the last decade. Um, and so how did I f- how did I find this role? Um, I think... So first of all, this is my first chief of staff gig.
I have been at this role for about two years. And, uh, one of the things I realized a few years ago is I kinda have this entrepreneurial spirits, like, burning, uh, you know, inside me. Yeah.
And, uh, my-- It became clear to me that my long-term goal is to be a founder of a software business. Um,
over the last decade, I've mostly been in customer success leadership roles at B2B SaaS organizations, ranging from, like, early stage companies, a million in ARR, uh, up to, like, 60, 70 million in ARR, so relatively earlier stage, uh, companies.
But also, yeah, it's been very focused on post-sales, and I realized that I wanted to get broader than just that.
I wanted to get exposure to different parts of the business that I haven't been able to, uh, to get exposure to in the past, uh, which is why I felt like the chief of staff type of role would be a great stepping stone into a future founder type of role.
Okay. And so how did I actually go about- [laughs]... getting this role? Honestly, there was a lot of luck involved.
Like, um, I'll say it was-- it's probably the lowest converting channel, which is, like, it was literally a cold outbound.
Uh, I applied from their website, uh, and h- honestly, my resume didn't necessarily scream chief of staff, but my, the recruiter, uh, found my profile interesting. Yeah. Uh, we had a good chat.
We hit it up, uh, hit it off. Uh, I connected with the CEO. We hit it off. We aligned on a lot of things, and I got the gig. Wow. And that's, uh, couple years? Yep. That was about, uh, a little shy of two years ago.
Okay. And, um, what, what were you working on when you first started, uh, the role, and what would you say you're, like, working on now? Yep. Great question.
So just a little bit more context about why my role was even created at LaunchDarkly. Um, we're about 10 years old right now, first of all. We have about 500 employees.
Goal is to inflect growth so we can, uh, you know, eventually be a sustainable, uh, lasting public company. Uh, we were a founder-led business- Mm... for about a decade, and um, we made a switch.
We wanted to get a, call it, professional CEO- [laughs]... on board, uh, to just help with that next phase of LaunchDarkly. So our CEO was brought in.
He started about six months before I did, and basically, once he started digging in, uh, he realized he has this massive transformation program that he wants to run across the org, and he just needs some strategy and op support.
Yeah. Um, and so this role was carved out for me, um, and that's how kind of I, I eventually, uh, came into this role. Yeah. Okay. And then, um, so that's why you kinda like came in. Yeah.
And then over the two years, like, how did- I've changed. Yeah, yeah. I've changed. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I think the first, I would say the first year or so was really focused on the basics.
A lot of it was actually building out the right leadership team. Mm. That was the CEO's primary focus.
Uh, and as you're, you know, building out an executive team, building out kinda the next level of VPs and stuff, one of the things that naturally happens in an organization like that is there's,
uh, a lot of change management that happens. Mm. A lot of, um, skepticism and a lot of worry among employees. So a lot of the first year was focused on helping our employees understand what is the vision.
Well, first of all, like, defining what is their actual vision- Mm... getting people bought in, getting a lot of the new leaders settled into the organization.
So I would say, like, that's, those are the main priorities that I helped our CEO with. And I would say over the last six months or so, we've kinda got the, the team on board.
We've got the right leadership on board, and now it's, like, about cranking scale and cra- cranking growth.
Um, so a lot of my stuff has shifted to ensuring that we're, you know, we're focused on the right things, ensuring that our execution is top-notch, ensuring that, uh, you know, we're pushing on all the levers that will help us unlock growth, uh-Such as AI [laughs] As an example, because that's the big hot thing that everyone's talking about these days.
Um, so you know, but the reality is, like, my priorities shift on a day-to-day basis.
Um, but that's-- That should give you a bit of a sense of how it's shifted, and, uh, I'd say, like, it's part of, like, what I love about the role. So yeah. Mm. That's why it's like, it's fun. The am-ambiguity- Yeah...
the uncertainty just, I think makes for a lot of fun, to be honest. Okay, and so you said the elephant in the room, you said AI. Um- Yep. And so how would you say that's, like, affecting your role? Yeah.
It's, uh, it's very interesting, um, and I think it's impacted my role tremendously over the last six months. Um, so let's see. Where should I start?
Uh, to take a step back, what are the some of the things that I focus on as a chief of staff? Uh, number one, like, outcome that I'm focused on is, uh, helping our company focus- Mm... on the right things- Yeah...
and ensuring that we're executing accordingly with the right level of accountability. Um, number two is I help with all the strategic communications, whether it's internal or to the board.
Number three is I work on a bunch of special projects. I'd say, like, those are the three big buckets. For each of those buckets, I've been, uh, thinking about how can AI- Mm... actually make my role a lot better.
So, uh, maybe I'll, I'll just give you a couple of examples that come to mind. Love it. I think the, the easiest use case of AI, uh, the one that I've been leaning into the most is strategic communications, okay?
It's like, I think there's some good AI tools out there. I mean, to be honest, like, the basic, like, ChatGPT, Gemini, et cetera, like, do pretty well at this.
But, uh, pushing updates to, uh, our company, uh, used to take ten hours often- Wow...
'cause you're-- you wanna get the right inputs from the right people, uh, and then you wanna make sure that the messaging aligns with your operating principles, it a-aligns with the tone of your CEO- Yeah... et cetera.
Uh, and
telling an AI, like, giving your AI basically an example or a few examples of CEO tone, plus, uh, you know, "Here's our operating principles, uh, and help me draft this up," like, you know, basically, like, has reduced a ten-hour communication, uh, timeline to, like, you know, you can basically get a first draft in seconds.
Wow. Um, so that has been an extremely powerful, uh, use case of AI. Uh, another example that I'll, uh, give is related to competitive positioning.
So in our space, over the last couple of weeks, there's been some M&A happening with our competitors.
There's been some funding rounds happening with our competitors, and we are always keen to know what's happening and what is, uh, what does that mean for us.
So one of the things that we really leaned into recently was doing some deep research using, again, I used Gemini for this specifically. Yeah. And we basically looked at publicly available
materials about our competitors, from our competitors' websites, from our documentation, about key features that we also kind of play in and helped identify what are some of the gaps that we may have- Mm...
not necessarily only from a product standpoint, but from a messaging standpoint. Mm. And how can we plug them? Yeah. And rather than having to...
You know, basically ran, like, a ten-minute deep research report, uh, and it produced a seventeen-page report, which you have to go through with a fine-tooth comb because some of the stuff is actually inaccurate.
[laughs] And yeah, as AI is getting better. But it really accelerated the research and helped us build a plan, uh, for a competitive response. So those are a couple of examples of how I've been using AI.
And I-- Maybe the third one I'll throw in is, like, AI note-taking- Mm... and task management. Um, that's, like, table stakes, I suppose, uh, these days. But lean into that as well.
And what, what tool are you using for the meetings and tasks and stuff? Granola is the one that I've been leaning into, and I, I know a lot of folks here use. Yeah. Okay. Mm-hmm. And then, um,
there-- recently there's been an AI memo, uh, was written by CEO of, uh, Shopify. Um, w-like, how was the response, uh, at your company about this?
Like, what, what has, like, been kind of like the high level, like, response or messaging around, like, this kind of memo? Yep. So yep.
There was a, uh, as many of you probably saw from, like, several weeks ago, there's a Shopify CEO sent a memo to their entire organization about how they should embrace AI.
Our CEO and the rest of the leadership team have been thinking about that as well. And honestly, like, uh, there's many early adopters of a lot of AI tools.
But one of the things that's been top of mind for our CEO is, okay, we wanna make sure that everybody in the org is really thinking about AI in a proactive manner.
So I think he was, he was already planning to publish his own kind of version, and then when he saw this, uh, Shopify memo come out, he's like, "Okay," like, "that's a good nudge to me to actually publish, uh, and share, uh, my expectations and thoughts with the company on what we, as LaunchDarkly specifically, uh, should be doing, uh, for AI."
So we actually ended up, you know, creating our and publishing our own, uh, AI memo about it, uh, which was shared with the company a couple of weeks ago. We actually followed that up with an AI-focused town hall- Mm...
for the entire company, where we, uh, brought a panel of, uh, you know, some of the early adopters of AI in the org together.
Uh, we, you know, announced our AI team leads for each department, and we showed a bunch of cool demos, uh, to kinda set the standard, set the expectation- Yeah...
for what, uh, we need to be, uh, how we need to be operating kinda going forward. So I think we're still-- Yeah, I mean, I would say, like-Early in our AI journey, uh, flirting with it in many- Yeah...
parts of the organization still.
But there's, uh, definitely the mindset that we need to embrace this thing, or it's gonna, you know, get too far ahead of us, and, uh, we, you know, we wanna stay ahead to continue to win. Yeah. I love it. I love it.
And those like either the memo or the town hall, like, what, what... Did you have a, like, an involvement in that or- Yep. Yep, exactly. I mean, I wrote up the memo. [laughs] I, I ran the town hall.
[laughs] So, uh, yeah, it's interesting. I think, uh, from a chief of stan- a chief of staff standpoint, um,
you know, chiefs of staff are often, uh, expected to be the person kind of driving AI change across the organization.
And the reason for that is because, I mean, chiefs of staff tend to just pick up stuff that nobody else owns. Yeah.
And this is still all so new that folks haven't really necessarily, you know, developed AI-focused teams to, to drive transformation across the organization.
So this is like a very natural thing that will start coming, uh, the way of chiefs of staff, and I'm sure a lot, most or many chiefs of staff are thinking about this actively, so that's why it came my way.
Um, and like I said, we're still in the early innings. There's a lot of stuff we have to figure out, like, you know, security and risk- Mm-hmm... and trusting what AI actually like, you know, provides.
Um, but, uh, it's a good step in the right direction. Okay. Is there anything else you wanna share about AI, chief of staff, uh, or any message to, like, aspiring chiefs of staff?
Is there anything else you definitely wanna share? Yeah, I think, uh, you know, I read this interesting, uh, tweet yesterday, uh, from someone in the tech space, which is quite interesting.
And it was, it was definitely a very pro-provocative, uh, tweet, but it said something along the lines of, "AI will replace all jobs." I know that's like a, you know... I know it's a bit of an exaggeration.
Uh, the o- the only job that will remain is the chief of staff. And I was kinda reflecting on it, and I think, uh, what the person was basically calling out is
being a generalist, a strong generalist, in this wave of AI is critical. Uh, and folks who are excellent generalists in this AI wave will really accelerate their careers over the next few years.
So I g- suppose my message to our fellow chiefs of staff and aspiring chiefs of staff is embrace the AI wave.
Uh, I feel like even for myself, over the last couple of months, powered by AI, I have been able to do a lot of tasks that I don't think I would have personally ever been able to do in the past. So embrace the wave.
Try to go for those tough, difficult questions, the, the tough issues that no one in the org has a clear owner for but may still be impactful to the organization.
Um, and yeah, you, you'll be in the right place, and, uh, I think that'll increase your odds of being successful with your career. So that's my message to the team. I love it. Thank you so much. Cool. Thank you.
Appreciate you having me. [upbeat music]