At my previous company, where raising money and making sense of accounting was a non-trivial, the Chief of Staff was (like the CEO and the CFO) a former investm

At my previous company, where raising money and making sense of accounting was a non-trivial, the Chief of Staff was (like the CEO and the CFO) a former investment banker for +10 years. He definitely felt like the #2 of the company (ex-aequo with CTO & CFO) and not an executive assistant. In practice, he was in charge of internal communication with non CxO people and the CEO, and a lot of things that the CEO had to do that wasn’t direction external relations (typically press): preparing financial documents, coordinating teams with legal, team morale, etc.