Chief of Staff

Overview

You're the right hand to Cortea's founder Valentin, running the operational engine behind an AI audit software company. You own GTM strategy, day-to-day ops, finance, and investor relations. This is the 0-to-1 chief of staff role where you're building processes, not inheriting them.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Series A (€10M+ raised)

Size: ~3-15 employees (estimated based on funding stage)

Growth: Live product, paying customers across Europe, actively scaling

Market Position: Early-stage AI challenger in audit tech - a traditional, regulated industry being disrupted

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

GTM Strategy (30%) | Ops/Finance (25%) | Fundraising/Investors (25%) | Special Projects (20%)

Key Activities

• GTM Strategy & Execution: You're setting pricing, defining ICP, building sales processes from scratch, tracking funnel metrics, and figuring out what channels actually work for selling to auditors. You're not doing the selling, but you're building the playbook.
• Operations & Finance: Running financial models, managing burn rate, building operational dashboards, setting up systems (CRM, billing, etc.), and making sure the company doesn't run out of money or miss payroll.
• Fundraising & Investor Relations: Preparing board decks, managing investor updates, building pitch materials for next funding round, coordinating due diligence requests, and keeping VCs informed without oversharing.
• High-Impact Projects: Whatever the founder needs handled that week - hiring plans, legal negotiations, strategic partnerships, market research, crisis management. You're the "figure it out" person.
• Internal Coordination: You're the translation layer between founder vision and team execution. Lots of alignment meetings, priority setting, and making sure everyone knows what matters this month.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• You're building everything from scratch with limited resources. There's no operations manual or finance team to delegate to - you're it.
• Founder context-switching is real. Valentin will shift priorities based on customer feedback, investor conversations, or market changes. You need to adapt fast without losing track of what you were already doing.
• Audit is a highly regulated, conservative industry. Selling AI to auditors means overcoming skepticism about accuracy, compliance, and changing established workflows. Your GTM strategy has to account for long education cycles.
• You're wearing too many hats. Some days you're building financial models, other days you're drafting board memos, other days you're interviewing candidates. The context switching is exhausting.
• Early-stage chaos means incomplete information. You'll make decisions without perfect data and need to be comfortable with ambiguity.
• Investor management is constant. You're always preparing for the next board meeting, update email, or funding conversation even while running the business.

What Success Looks Like

• You've built a repeatable GTM motion that's signing customers consistently (not just one-off deals)
• Financial models are accurate, board meetings run smoothly, and investors are confident in the trajectory
• You've hired key roles (sales leader, operations person, etc.) and can start delegating pieces of your job
• The founder trusts you to make decisions independently rather than running everything by them
• You've helped close the next funding round or demonstrated sustainable unit economics

Who You're Enabling (Not Selling To)

Your job is to enable sales to these buyers:

Primary Buyers for Cortea:

• Partners/Directors at audit firms (Big 4, mid-tier, boutique)
• Heads of Audit at large enterprises
• Compliance/Risk leaders in financial services

What They Care About:

• Regulatory compliance and audit trail integrity (AI can't create liability)
• Accuracy and defensibility of results (audits get challenged, AI outputs must be explainable)
• Integration with existing audit workflows and documentation standards
• Time savings that actually reduce project costs without compromising quality

Requirements

• 5+ years in operations, strategy consulting, investment banking, or high-growth startup environments - you've built things from 0 to 1 before
• Financial modeling and business operations experience - you can build a three-statement model and actually use it to run the business
• GTM or sales strategy experience, ideally in B2B SaaS - you understand funnels, CAC/LTV, and what makes enterprise sales work
• Comfort with ambiguity and rapid context-switching - you don't need perfect instructions to figure things out
• Fundraising or investor relations experience preferred - you've built pitch decks, managed due diligence, or worked closely with VCs
• Based in Berlin or willing to relocate - this is a high-touch role working directly with the founder
• Fluent in English; German is a plus for European market expansion