“A COO without the title”: meeting Laetitia Farrugia (BBA 10), Chief of Staff, Zoom

Automatically generated translation.

In France, Chiefs of Staff are rare, if not entirely non-existent. In the United States, they hold a very specific role, working as closely as possible with senior leaders. Laetitia Farrugia (BBA 10) is Chief of Staff to the CEO of Zoom, a position that crowns a career spent within two tech giants: Apple, then VMware. From San Jose, California, she sets out the contours of her current role and shares her view of a sector poised to revolutionise the world. 

“A real Chief of Staff is a COO without the title,” says Laetitia Farrugia straight away. In France, the role has no real equivalent, and the job title causes confusion. She explains : “at Apple, when people talk about a Chief of Staff, they mean a secretary. In government, it’s the person you have to go through before you can speak to the president”. Her role within video-conferencing giant Zoom lies elsewhere: an executive working in the shadows, tasked with connecting the CEO and the leadership teams and with defusing problems before they even break out. She sums it up : “I anticipate disasters, constantly ”.

With no formal power, her role is built on trust. “As Chief of Staff, I have no authority. The authority I do have is the one I’ve built for myself. It’s what you might ultimately call influence”. Teams need to be able to call her before raising the alarm at the top, because that is the only way she can act. “If everyone around me is struggling, it means I haven’t done my job properly,” she explains. 

Among her responsibilities: anticipating needs before they are even voiced. “Zoom’s CEO looks to the left and I look to the right. When he thinks “ I’ve got an idea for a new product ”, I’ve already anticipated it.” How ? “Because I listen to him. I know the way he thinks, I know which people he is going to meet ”. One example : “if he attends an event or a conference, I know he will probably come back saying “ I need this ”. So I warn the teams: start thinking about it, otherwise the CEO will be frustrated at having to wait several weeks to launch his new project.”

“Good at everything, expert in nothing”

How does one become a Chief of Staff? The turning point perhaps comes down to a single sentence. At VMware, one of her CTOs told her: “You’re good at everything, but you’re excellent at nothing. You’re a generalist and I don’t know what to do with you.” The diagnosis was nothing new. At Apple, in marketing, she was already described as “technical” even though she was neither an engineer nor a developer. “My whole family are engineers and I was proud not to be one.” While she set her sights on marketing when she left business school, in every job she was quickly steered towards other roles: “I would come in through marketing and after six months my role would be changed”. 

At VMware, she was handed the incubator. “I must have been 24 or 25 and I was dealing with technologies that didn’t yet exist. I found myself facing CTOs of 50, even 60, who had created disruptive technologies.” An exhausting but formative job, thanks to the many mentors she met along the way. “ Californian tech entrepreneurs like to pass on what they know ”, she says. “ They’re capable of telling you: “ the skills you have, I don’t have. I’ll teach you what I know, and you’ll teach me what I can’t do. ” I found myself alongside people with extraordinary titles who would spend two hours explaining a technical tool to me.” A commitment to passing things on that now drives her : “I’m heading into my forties and I have a duty towards the next generation”.

Unclassifiable

Looking back, she notes that her career path looks a lot like her. “I was born near Marseille, into a family with Tunisian and Sicilian roots. My grandparents were a carpenter and a cleaner. They were people who worked hard. My father, however, never really accepted his lot. He looked elsewhere, abroad, and he managed to invent technologies that are known the world over today”.

In the classroom, she stood out. Her Marseille prépa (French intensive preparatory classes, ed.) pushed her towards the door: “It was made very clear to me that I wasn’t part of the French system, that I would never amount to anything.”. The revelation came a few years later. “I think I was simply looking in the wrong system.” At EPSCI (formerly ESSEC’s BBA, ed.), she found “a home, a place where internationalisation is celebrated and where asking questions is a good thing”. She left trilingual, after an exchange in Cardiff.

She then learned on the ground. During an internship with the Pierre et Vacances group, in particular : “I was so desperate to get a job that I told them: “ take me on for free ””. A month later, her manager pulled her up: “You sold yourself for nothing. That is your value. Never go into a situation without knowing your worth.” One of her greatest lessons in business.

Technology is never bad

In the microcosm of Californian tech, her outspokenness and her curiosity stand out and appeal. What she likes above all: the idea of doing things together. She joined Zoom in the middle of Covid, when the company was in a phase of hypergrowth. On her second day, she was asked to put together a presentation for the CEO. “I had three hours. I had no idea how my team worked. I panicked, I cried, thinking I would never manage it.” So she called her team, remotely, people who didn’t know her. “They replied: “ we’ve got your back ”. Two hours later, the presentation was done.” In a sector where everything moves fast, she values the team spirit: “people don’t play for themselves, quite simply because they don’t have the time and because the main objective is the company’s success”.   

As for the future, she says she is optimistic and rejects extreme views. “AI has always been there, under different names. It is nothing new. Some people think the bubble is going to burst; for others, it’s Terminator. I think technology is never bad in itself: it’s the use humans make of it that can make things go wrong.”

Her conviction: “We are creating a democracy of technology.” Much like the internet a few years ago, or Apple’s consumer tools: GarageBand, iMovie, the iPhone… which allowed those “who didn’t have the budget” to shoot their films and record their albums. She is nonetheless aware that we are only at the very beginning and that mistakes happen. “You can’t ask a baby to run before it has learned to walk”. In the meantime, she carries on whispering in the ears of tech leaders, those “big children with a lot of money and a lot of ideas, who have only just discovered fire”. The trick now is not to burn down the forest.