What is the Role of the Chief Operating Officer? COO vs CEO Explained

In this video, you'll learn the ins and outs of a Chief Operating Officer (COO) or VP of Ops and their role at a startup.
00:00 Intro
00:48 Finance
01:20 Functional Expert
01:53 HR Recruiting
02:25 Insurance
02:51 Technology
03:17 Technology Stack
03:41 Policies
03:58 Money
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Hey, it's Scott Orn at Kruze Consulting, and today I'm answering the question, what does the VP of Ops or COO at a startup do?
And really the answer is a little bit of everything. I like to think of the COO or VP of Ops as like, if you're in a rock band, the Founder or CEO is typically like the lead singer, and you, COO, I'm a COO, so I can say this, you are like the bassist, or you're the drummer. You're very necessary for the company to make beautiful music, but you're kinda not the person that's out front and center for the company, that's typically the Founder or CEO. But that's okay, if your personality is suited to that and you enjoy the work, it's an incredible job. I enjoy my job thoroughly. So let's go through some of the functional things that a COO does.
Almost always the COO at a startup will be, or a VP of Ops will manage the finances. They'll work with an accounting team like Kruze to make sure all the monthly financials happen, the financials get closed, all questions are answered. Revenue Rec, expenses are all done correctly. All tax compliance is done correctly, like the tax return gets filed, your R&D Tax Credit gets done. Often, you'll be interviewed as part of the R&D Tax Credit process to make sure all the employee engineer allocations are done correctly, and the projects are documented.
But finance is gonna be something you do spend a lot of time on. Now, when you hire a VP of Finance or a CFO, this'll be much less part of your day. And that's kind of the rule for the VP of Ops or COO, you kinda have a lot of responsibility in the early days, and most startups kind of constantly are hiring like a functional expert to take things off your plate and the CEO's plate. That's just the name of the game, and really, it's always very refreshing when a company brings in someone to take a functional aspect of the company off your plate. It's very, very nice.
So you're gonna do finance. You will probably run, or have recruiting and HR reporting to you, but, you know, recruiting and HR kinda get lumped in together quite a bit, but they are two different functions, especially if you're growing fast and recruiting a lot of people. But HR and recruiting are typically an operations type of role. You wanna make sure that you're in compliance on things like your HR handbook, and that you're doing all the best practices for hiring. You wanna make sure that you have the right recruiting mechanisms in place, or you're working with recruiters on the outside, or you maybe have a dedicated team internally, so that's really important. Also, there's just kind of, this kind of straddles HR and operations, but there's gonna be a lot of insurance and nitty gritty things that you're gonna need to handle.
Like this comes to mind, because you're always gonna wanna have employment liability insurance, and maybe you're gonna wanna have your, you know, your general liability insurance and all, errors and emissions and all these kinds of things. This is something that, because you're the COO or VP of Ops, you kinda sit across a lot of different functional aspects of the business. You need to remember to do these things and have these things in place. The next group you're gonna have reporting to you is typically like the technology group.
Now, this is not like the rockstar developers, if you're a software company or a med tech company, or the scientists, you know, if you're a healthcare biotech company, because those usually report up to like the CTO or the Chief Medical Officer or the CEO. But like your technology group, your technology stack, the people who manage all of your technology, especially the IT services group, they're definitely gonna report up to you. That's just, that is an area of high risk for a VP of Ops or COO, you wanna make sure all this stuff is done correctly.