Dmitri Erchov · Chief of Staff to founders & CEOs

01 About

I work next to founders and CEOs as their Chief of Staff. My job is to make sure the right decisions get made. Then I make sure they actually happen.

I'm a fixer when something's broken. I co-founded a firm that ran turnarounds across $65M+ in distressed assets, and I've stepped into portfolio companies as interim operator. At my last startup I rebuilt GTM from the ground up, and the sales team ended up booking twice as many meetings.

I'm a strategist when the decision is big. I help the CEO frame it and pressure-test it before the team or board sees it. I've read board decks as a PE investor running a $30M pipeline and written them as Chief of Staff and COO. I structured partnerships with Google and Autodesk that made the product more stable.

I'm the glue when teams pull in different directions. I get the disagreement on the table early, while it's still about the work. Then I get everyone behind one plan, aligned to strategic priorities. I took OKRs company-wide at a deep tech startup, and teams stopped drifting apart.

And I'm hands-on the rest of the time. I've raised $4.6M across pre-seed and seed and run the diligence and legal behind both rounds. I've grown a team from 18 to 55 while getting it to profitability, and hired much of it myself. And I automate whatever repeats. For example, I built Faultline, a Claude skill that finds the questions that actually matter. The ones a sharp operator or a hostile investor would ask to find where the thing breaks. It's free on GitHub.

Next: a Chief of Staff role next to a founder or CEO. Early-stage or scaling, industry-agnostic since problems rhyme.

02 Career

2024 — 2026

Chief of Staff / Head of Operations

Runzy

Boston, MA

Ran the operating rhythm for the founder and the team. OKRs, async updates and dashboards cut the meeting load. Rebuilt GTM and pricing, and stood up an SDR team that doubled held meetings. Launched a daily newsletter with an ad platform, creating a new revenue line and a 20%+ revenue lift.
2024 — 2026

Strategy & Operations Advisor

HustlePay

San Francisco, CA

Payments startup building a checkout layer that lets shoppers combine multiple cards, wallets, and account balances in a single purchase.
2019 — 2024

Webgears

Redwood City, CA
1. 2023 — 2024
  
  Strategic Advisor
  
  Post-acquisition transition and continuity.
2. 2021 — 2023
  
  Chief Operating Officer
  
  Ran the business side of a deep tech startup as it scaled from 18 people to 55 and was acquired. GTM across multiple verticals, partnerships with Google and Autodesk, P&L, hiring — everything that wasn't the 3D engine itself. Revenue grew 120% YoY on average.
3. 2019 — 2021
  
  Chief of Staff
  
  Strategy, finance, hiring, and cross-functional execution — translating founder priorities into operating plans with real follow-through. Raised $4.6M in pre-seed and seed.
2015 — 2018

Managing Director / Equity Partner

SkySail Investment Management

Moscow

A mix of investing and operating. Managed a $30M pipeline, put together $22M+ in debt deals, and stepped in as interim operator when portfolio companies needed one.
2008 — 2015

Managing Director / Co-Founder

Clarus Capital

Moscow

Built an investment and advisory firm from three founders to twenty-five people, overseeing $65M+ in distressed assets. Ran day-to-day operations and client work across restructuring, interim management, and asset sales. Sold to a banking group.
2004 — 2008

Sr. Business Analyst / Project Manager

Arbella Insurance Group

Quincy, MA

Underwriting systems, fraud detection, and product expansion into new markets.

03 Open Source

Open-source tools for the work itself. Mostly Claude Code skills and operating tooling.

faultline Shipped

Pressure-tests early-stage operations work with sharp, context-grounded questions. The kind a good board member would ask before you noticed the gap yourself.
skill-safety-check Shipped

Static safety triage for agent skills. Point it at a repo or paste a skill and get a SAFE / REVIEW / DO NOT INSTALL verdict before you run it.
llm-knowledgebase Shipped

A safe, local LLM knowledge base with immutable sources and an agent-maintained Markdown wiki. The sources can't drift; the wiki on top of them can.
DeAI Shipped

A self-review skill that catches AI tells, voice mismatches, and weak substance in written work — before a human has to.
My_Claude.MD Shipped

An opinionated CLAUDE.md baseline for planning, debugging, security, and verification in Claude Code.

04 Side Projects

Pack or Stay Shipped

For anyone weighing a move between cities. Pick two metros, enter a salary, and it shows what each actually leaves you after taxes, housing and everyday costs — then answers in a word: pack, stay, or too close to call. Built on public data only — Census, BLS, IRS, the Tax Foundation — across 438 metro areas.
Source
Hi, Sweetie — Letters Shipped

Letters from a dad to his daughters, published as they're written.
Political Compass In progress

An interactive atlas of political movements and parties — Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Anarchists and the rest — mapped so you can see how they actually relate to each other.