The operator running the room
Chief of Staff is one of those titles that means everything and nothing at the same time. Ask around Silicon Valley and you'll get as many definitions as people. At Babylist, the role belongs to Alex Bergonia - and at a company that crossed $500 million in annual revenue while simultaneously running a baby registry, a curated shop, and an insurance product for breast pumps, "the operator running the room" is the only description that fits.
Bergonia's job, in the bluntest terms: make sure CEO Natalie Gordon's priorities don't get lost in the noise of running a 1,200-person company. That's harder than it sounds. Babylist isn't a single-product startup anymore. It's a platform with a physical retail presence, a marketplace, a health division, and a content arm - each with its own tempo, its own stakeholders, its own gravitational pull. The Chief of Staff is the person who keeps those orbits aligned. Bergonia does that work from Emeryville, California, where Babylist is headquartered.
She didn't arrive there by the typical route.
"I was drawn to FBN's mission to level the playing field for independent farmers and work to make farming more sustainable and profitable for all."
- Alex Bergonia, on joining Farmer's Business NetworkMission before market size
Before Babylist, before agri-fintech, before any of it - Bergonia spent the first chapter of her career chasing problems that didn't have easy market comparables. She went to Claremont McKenna College for International Relations, a degree that trains you to think across systems, across borders, across incentive structures that don't share a common language. Then she went to UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business for her MBA - and she didn't go to land a consulting gig. She went to build the toolkit to actually do something with what she believed in.
The evidence is in the fellowship choices. During her MBA years, she was a Senior Fellow at Komaza, a reforestation company working in sub-Saharan Africa. She was a Packard Foundation MBA Fellow at The Nature Conservancy - a program that the foundation funds specifically for business students who want to apply their training to conservation. She interned at DBL Partners, an impact investing firm in San Francisco whose entire thesis is that market-rate returns and positive social outcomes are not mutually exclusive. She worked at RSF Social Finance as an MBA associate in investing.
This isn't a story about someone who dabbled in purpose before pivoting to money. It's a story about someone who built a coherent point of view - that capital should flow toward things that matter - and then spent years finding the right expression of it.
What a Chief of Staff actually does
The Chief of Staff role sits at the intersection of strategy and execution. At a company like Babylist, that means translating the CEO's priorities into organized action across multiple business units, managing the operational rhythm of the leadership team, and serving as a trusted advisor and force multiplier for the CEO. The role requires someone who can think at the level of the board deck and operate at the level of the weekly team standup - simultaneously.
From farmland to family products
The pivot to Farmer's Business Network (FBN) in 2020 was, on the surface, a departure. FBN is a data-driven network for independent farmers - a company that uses technology to give agricultural producers the same kind of market intelligence that used to be the exclusive domain of agribusiness giants. But look closer: it's still mission-aligned work. FBN Financial, the division Bergonia joined, was newly launched at the time - a zero-to-one challenge, the kind of environment where a strategist either finds their footing fast or doesn't find it at all.
She found her footing. In less than two years, she moved from associate to manager to senior manager to director - a progression that FBN publicly credited to her role as "a key driver of excellence in marketing operations, analytics and reporting." By the time she left for Babylist, she had helped build an entire financial product line from the ground up.
That experience - scaling something from launch, building operational infrastructure, running analytics and reporting at a product level - is exactly what a Chief of Staff needs. The title changes at Babylist. The underlying skill set doesn't.
Babylist, at scale
Understanding Alex Bergonia's role requires understanding what Babylist has become. When Natalie Gordon started it in 2011, the concept was elegant and specific: a baby registry that let expecting parents add products from any store, not just one retailer. The insight was borrowed from the friction Gordon encountered as a software engineer-turned-mother - why should you be locked into Target's catalog when the stroller you want is at Buy Buy Baby and the monitor is on Amazon?
That single insight has compounded into something considerably larger. Babylist today runs a curated shop, a subscription model, a health division that handles insurance-covered breast pump distribution, an acquired wellness platform (Expectful, focused on the pre-pregnancy through postpartum period), and a content operation that functions as a trusted editorial voice for new and expecting parents. Annual revenue crossed $500 million. The company raised $40 million in its Series C round in 2021. It counts executives from Amazon, Google, Netflix, McKinsey, eBay, and Chewy among its leadership ranks.
Running strategic coordination for a CEO overseeing all of that is not a role for someone who likes clean boundaries and predictable days.