I built myself a Chief of Staff
Not to automate my work. To stop losing context every time I switched ventures.
Issue #08 · July 5th 2026
I write about the things that don’t change in a world that won’t stop changing.
I believe adding real value is what gives us purpose, keeps us happy and improves our lives.
Running two ventures simultaneously as a fractional operator is not a workload problem. It is a context problem.
The meetings were happening. Fathom was capturing everything. The information existed. What didn’t exist was a system that held it all together between sessions, surfaced what mattered, and let me walk into the next conversation without rebuilding the picture from scratch every time.
That is what I built.
The tax nobody talks about
When you run a single company with a fixed team, context is cheap. It lives in the room, in the shared history, in the person who was also on last Tuesday’s call. You don’t have to reconstruct it. It’s just there.
As a fractional operator, the context is never just there. On any given week I might be vibe coding a new tool in the morning, in a sales presentation by lunch, writing a venture concept in the afternoon, and on a strategic call with a ministry by end of day. Each of those requires a completely different mental mode. And each of them leaves a trail of open threads, commitments, and next steps that don’t wait for me to catch up.
Every time I switched modes I was paying a switching tax. Not in hours, but in mental overhead. Pulling up notes, re-reading summaries, trying to remember where a conversation had landed, what the next step was, who was waiting for something from me.
Fathom solved the capture problem. Every meeting was transcribed, stored, searchable. The information existed. But information sitting in a folder is not the same as a system that uses it. I was still the one connecting the dots, every time, from scratch.
I didn’t need more information. I needed something that held the thread.
“I didn’t need more information. I needed something that held the thread.”
Why a human Chief of Staff doesn’t work here
A traditional Chief of Staff works for a CEO with a fixed organisation, a fixed office, and a context that doesn’t shift radically from week to week. You can onboard someone into that role. The scope is stable enough to hire for.
As a fractional operator, the scope is the problem. One week I’m deep in European data space regulation for NEXMO. The next I am digging into a new venture concept: business model, product, market size. The week after I’m back in Madrid coordinating a Ministry meeting. No single person can hold all of that context across all of those worlds and be available when I need them, at the cost that makes sense for the structure I operate in.
The alternative is to build it. So I did.
The hardware layer
The first decision was infrastructure. A Chief of Staff that only works when your laptop is open is not a Chief of Staff. It’s a tab.
You need something always on. That’s the only real requirement. I use a Mac Mini M4 at home, configured as a server, but this is not a Mac Mini story. A Raspberry Pi does the job. An old laptop you leave running in a corner does the job. The hardware investment is trivial. A decent setup costs less than a single day of consulting fees.
Tailscale handles remote access so I can reach it from anywhere. The infrastructure decision came before the software decision because the tool only works if it runs continuously, in the background, processing and surfacing information whether I’m in a meeting, on a plane, or asleep.
The always-on constraint is what makes everything else possible. The device that satisfies it almost doesn’t matter.
The software layer
The agent platform is OpenClaw, running on the always-on server. It connects to Gmail, Fathom, and WhatsApp. Fathom transcripts feed into it after every meeting. Gmail keeps it aware of ongoing threads and commitments. WhatsApp conversations, where a lot of real venture communication actually happens, feed into it as well. Nothing important falls outside the system’s awareness.
I communicate with it through Telegram and Slack. Both work. Telegram is faster for quick checks on the go. Slack sits inside the same workspace as the venture teams, so the CoS is present in the same channels where work actually happens.
The configuration is where most of the real work lives. OpenClaw runs on a set of structured markdown files that define how the system thinks and operates. There is a Soul file that defines the identity and operating principles of the agent. There are Agent files that define each venture context, the stakeholders, the current priorities, the open threads. There are files that define how to communicate, what to escalate, and what to ignore. Together they are not a simple instruction. They are a detailed operating manual written in plain text, versioned, and updated as the ventures evolve.
Getting that right took iteration. The first version surfaced too much. The second version was too conservative. The current version has learned, through repeated adjustment, what I actually need to know versus what I can find when I go looking. That calibration is ongoing. The system evolves as the ventures evolve.
It also connects to my calendar. It knows what is coming before I do. If I have a meeting on Thursday, it surfaces the relevant context on Wednesday without being asked. That proactive layer is what separates an agent from a search tool.
“A Soul file. Agent files. Communication rules. A detailed operating manual written in plain text.”
What it actually does
On a typical morning, before I open my first email, the system has already processed whatever happened overnight. Fathom transcripts from late meetings. Calendar changes. Anything flagged across the Slack channels it monitors.
What I get is not a dump of information. It is a prioritised picture. What needs attention today. What is still open from last week. What I committed to in the MOVEN call that I haven’t acted on yet. What the NEXMO team is waiting for.
The key metric, the one that matters most to me, is simple: I no longer start a session by asking myself where I left this. The thread is held. I pick it up and keep going.
That sounds small. It is not small. The switching tax was invisible until it was gone. Now I notice it immediately on the rare occasions the system misses something and I have to reconstruct context manually. That friction, which used to be constant, now feels like an exception.
The invariant
The Chief of Staff didn’t make me faster at doing things. It made me faster at knowing what to do next.
That is a different kind of value, and it is the kind that compounds. Every week the system has more context. Every month the operating manual is more precise. The longer it runs, the less I lose in the gaps between sessions.
If I had to give up one tool in my current setup, this would be the last one I’d let go. Not because of what it automates, but because of what it holds.
Context is the scarcest resource for a fractional operator. I stopped treating it as something I had to rebuild. I built a system to hold it for me instead.
Fernando Martín is Managing Director of NEXMO Movement Data Hub (UC3M), Venture Builder at MOVEN, and founder of Eccocar. He writes here about venture building, AI agent operations, and the European technology landscape.
The Invariance — by Fernando Martín In a constantly evolving world, only value is the invariance that holds everything together.
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