How A Chief of Staff At Clay Got Her Role and Uses Clay with Julia Govberg
Julia Govberg, a Chief of Staff at Clay, joins David Nebinski to unpack what the role really looks like inside a fast-scaling startup. She shares how her VC background at First Round Capital helped her land the job, her "majors and minors" framework, the three types of Chief of Staff every Founder should know, and how she uses Clay for intros, account research, and conference prep. If you are looking for a Chief of Staff role or hiring one, this episode is practical for you too.
Connect with Julia on LinkedIn here!
FULL VIDEO
You can watch the video of this episode here!
Episode highlights:
0:00: How Julia Got the Chief of Staff Role
0:02: Product Familiarity as an Edge in the Interview
0:02: Why Clay Hired a Chief of Staff
0:03: Current Scope: Firefighting & Operating Cadence
0:05: “Majors and Minors” Framework
0:08: How Clay Uses Clay (Julia’s Use Cases)
0:12: Conference & Event Strategy with Clay
0:15: Nature of the Role: Business Building & Gap Filling
0:16: Difference from Previous Chief of Staff Role
0:18: How to Find / Win Chief of Staff Roles
0:18: Three Types of Chiefs of Staff
0:20: Advice to Current & Aspiring Chiefs of Staff
Episode overview:
Julia Govberg is the Chief of Staff at Clay, and this episode traces how she moved from early-stage venture into a deeply operational, cross-functional role inside a fast-scaling startup, and how she uses Clay as both a product and a leverage tool.
She started her career at First Round Capital, where she spent five years and first encountered Clay when the firm invested in its seed round. First Round used Clay to enrich its CRM and surface Founders through signals like job changes and new company formation, giving Julia early exposure to the team, product, and trajectory. When Clay later ran a nine‑month search for a Chief of Staff, she was looking to leave investing and jump into operating, bringing that long-term familiarity as a unique edge in the process.
Joining at around 85 employees, Julia stepped into a role designed as the “cross-functional glue” across sales, customer success, support, and other emerging functions. As Clay scaled to over 400 people, her work evolved into roughly 90% firefighting and gap filling, standing up sales and recruiting ops before those leaders were hired, building legal workflows with outside counsel prior to formal legal hires, and spinning up quick-hit projects across the org. She frames her work as “majors and minors”: multi-week or multi-month core projects, plus shorter, high-impact drills like investor decks or targeted pipeline sprints.
A key throughline is how she uses Clay as a Chief of Staff: managing the VC channel, generating and prioritizing target account lists, mapping investor overlaps for warm intros, prepping for sales conversations with Gong-powered insights, and prioritizing conference or dinner attendees to meet.
Julia also lays out a three-type model of Chiefs of Staff (EA-style, shadow, and special projects), offers advice on finding CoS roles via VCs and networks, and emphasizes that the role is ideal for generalists who thrive in ambiguity, constant learning, and rapid company building.
Connect with Julia on LinkedIn here!
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