Louis Bidou

As a startup founder or CEO, you face relentless challenges: aligning your leadership team, executing strategic priorities, and building scalable systems—all while navigating rapid growth. As Chief of Staff, I help you bring clarity, structure, and momentum to your business.

With over a decade of experience as Chief of Staff to founders and CEOs across Europe and the US, I offer hands-on operational expertise and strategic insight tailored to your startup’s needs. Together, we’ll tackle your most pressing challenges, streamline execution, and position your business for sustainable success—all in a format built for fast-paced environments.

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I’m here to help founders turn strategic priorities into measurable outcomes. So my work is designed to create clarity, alignment, and impact across the organization:

1. Organizational Clarity

• Aligning leadership on goals and metrics (e.g., OKRs, dashboards).

• Preparing communication and materials for board, investor, and team alignment.

2. Operational Discipline

• Building and embedding scalable systems and workflows (e.g., project management, cross-functional processes).

• Ensuring execution rhythm with leadership meetings, retros, and standups.

3. Leadership Leverage

• Acting as a sparring partner and trusted advisor for the CEO.

• Supporting the CEO in high-stakes scenarios like fundraising, key hires, or organizational change.

My goal is to help you bridge the gap between strategy and execution with lasting impact.

Upflow is the Financial Relationship Management (FRM) platform for mid-market B2B companies, giving finance teams one place to track, collect, and get paid fast. By replacing spreadsheet-based processes with AI, analytics, and modern payment capabilities, Upflow improves cash flows and customer experience, and turns receivables from a back-office chore into a strategic advantage.

Presence in NYC and Paris. Backed by leading investors: Hedosophia, Y Combinator, Hexa.

> upflow.io

• Own the translation of company strategy into an execution system (priorities, OKRs, rituals, dashboards) used across Product, Revenue, and Finance, reducing execution ambiguity and increasing alignment across teams.

• Design, run, and continuously improve the executive decision architecture (weekly and quarterly forums, structured inputs, clear cadence), shortening decision cycles to days and clarifying ownership and decision rights as complexity scales.

• Own the inputs leadership uses to allocate resources and set trade-offs, clarifying where to invest, where to slow down, and where execution is at risk, reducing late-stage surprises.

• Maintain closed execution loops by feeding frontline signals into strategy, priorities, and resourcing decisions, enabling course-corrections earlier rather than post-results.

• Increase CEO and leadership leverage by absorbing cross-functional complexity and structuring decisions upstream, freeing ~1–2 days/week of CEO bandwidth.

• Lead multiple critical cross-company initiatives in parallel in high-ambiguity contexts: strategic projects, org-wide priorities, and sensitive transitions.

Sketchfab is the leading platform for 3D & AR on the web, with a community of over 25m creators ; 8m scenes published ; 10m monthly unique visitors ; growing staff, and a three-sided B2B & B2C revenue model that has grown by 20x in 4 years. Acquired by Epic Games in July 2021.

> sketchfab.com

• Dynamic Leadership & Operations: Pivotal right-hand to the CEO & founders, guiding daily operations and ensuring seamless scalability.

• Financial Management & Strategy: Oversaw Finance, developing reporting tools for financial health, leading forecasts, and serving as the go-to during the M&A process.

• Revenue Growth & Cost Control: Spearheaded efforts that multiplied revenue by tenfold over 4 years, achieving profitability through stringent cost management.

• Stakeholder Liaison: Served as the chief contact for both US and French operations, liaising with accountants, banks, lawyers, and other key partners.

• Strategic Communication & Alignment: Supported top-level internal communication, led strategic retreats and workshops to align team efforts with company goals.

• Organizational Development: Cultivated a culture centered on psychological safety, trust, and continuous growth, enhancing onboarding, collaboration, and development.

• Expertise & Adaptation: Mastered rapid execution, complex problem-solving, and superior communication, alongside navigating organizational dynamics with emotional intelligence.