The person who keeps the chief executive of Substack pointed in the right direction. A Stanford East Asia scholar turned career operator, working in the engine room of the company that pays writers.
She has stood at the edge of a dozen borders. The interesting part is that she keeps coming back to startups.
At Substack, the CEO writes the vision and the engineers write the code. Carla Faraguna writes the day. Since July 2024 she has been Executive Assistant to the Chief Executive Officer, the role that decides which forty things on a founder's plate actually get done and in what order.
Substack is not a quiet place to land. It is the platform that flipped the economics of publishing, paying writers directly through subscriptions and turning a newsletter into a business model. The company has raised more than $200 million and counts a workforce in the thousands. Somewhere in the middle of all that motion sits a desk whose entire job is to keep the most contested calendar in the building from collapsing under its own weight.
The work rarely shows up in a press release. That is the point. A good executive assistant is the difference between a leader who is busy and a leader who is effective. The output is negative space: the meeting that did not run long, the decision that did not slip, the founder who walked into the room already briefed.
Faraguna arrived at this with a resume that reads like a slow accumulation of operating instinct rather than a straight line. Before the title, before Substack, there were knowledge graphs, HR systems, a teaching post in Japan, and a passport with a lot of stamps.
From November 2017 to July 2024, Faraguna ran operations and people functions at Golden, the venture-backed company building a self-constructing knowledge graph under founder Jude Gomila.
Ops and people is the least glamorous, most load-bearing pair of jobs in any young company. It means corporate filings and compliance deadlines and the quiet machinery of making sure a growing team actually gets paid, gets onboarded, and gets to keep working. When a startup hums, someone in this seat made the humming possible.
She stayed for nearly seven years, which in startup time is roughly a geological era. That tenure is the tell. People who are good at operations get poached fast; people who are trusted get kept. When Golden hit a milestone in 2020, her public reaction was not to take a bow but to congratulate the team and the founder. The instinct points outward. That is a useful instinct to have in the chair she sits in now.
By the time she moved to Substack, she had spent the better part of a decade learning how startups actually run from the inside, not the pitch-deck version. The newsletter company did not hire an assistant. It hired an operating system with references.
Relative weighting by tenure and depth, not exact dates.
Cultural and nonprofit work, the first taste of running things behind the scenes.
Teaching and working abroad through the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program.
HR Coordinator, then Employee Programs Coordinator. People operations, formative edition.
Self-directed travel and volunteering across a dozen countries before returning to the startup world.
Operations and people for nearly seven years at the knowledge-graph startup.
Executive Assistant to the Chief Executive Officer.
Between jobs she spent roughly five months moving through twelve countries as a self-employed traveler and volunteer. She keeps a separate Instagram just for the trips - Whistler in 2022, Alaska in 2021.
A master's in East Asia Studies from Stanford, a political science degree from Stony Brook, and a teaching stint in Japan. The global resume is not decoration. It is the through-line.
When her old company hit a milestone, she put the spotlight on the team and the founder. The reflex to point credit outward is exactly what makes the executive-support seat work.
Her academic specialty is East Asia, studied at Stanford and lived out on the JET Program in Japan.
Twelve countries in about five months, volunteering and traveling between chapters of her career.
Runs a dedicated travel Instagram account, kept separate from her main profile.
Per her own emoji shorthand, the three interests that define the bio are mountains, beaches, and UFOs.
Nonprofit, media, knowledge graph, newsletter platform. Different industries, same seat - the one where operations and people meet, where a company either runs smoothly or does not, and where the best work is the kind nobody notices because nothing broke. Carla Faraguna has spent a career getting very good at the thing that does not make headlines, in service of the people who do.
Sources: The Org,
LinkedIn,
Golden,
Instagram,
X.
Profile compiled from public sources. Details unverifiable from public record were left out by design.