Melanie
Okuneye-Williams

The Chief of Staff who has already been a CEO.

The Chief of Staff role is a strange job. You are the CEO's second brain, notepad, and travel calendar. You have all of the responsibility and, formally, almost none of the authority. The good ones translate the founder's shorthand into things the executive team can act on. The very good ones have run their own thing first, which is why Vadim Vladimirskiy hired Melanie Okuneye-Williams.

Nerdio is a Chicago company that automates Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop, which is a phrase that means very little to normal humans and quite a lot to the IT departments of hospitals, banks, and school districts. In March 2025 it announced a $500 million Series C from General Atlantic and disclosed that it had crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue in about five years. Somewhere between those two milestones Nerdio decided the CEO needed a Chief of Staff, and Okuneye-Williams took the seat.

She is, by resume, an unlikely fit. Nerdio is a hybrid-cloud infrastructure company powered by C#, PowerShell, and a very long list of Azure product names. Okuneye-Williams is a Nigerian-British former performer with a Philosophy, Politics, and Economics degree who spent nearly five years at Goldman Sachs, did an MBA at Stanford, founded a teletherapy company for Africans and grew it to a profitable exit. Her career reads like a menu; his job description reads like a spec sheet. That is exactly why the match works.

Nerdio at $100 million ARR has the usual scaling problem, which is that everything the founders knew how to do three years ago no longer scales. The Chief of Staff role is the glue in that moment. Okuneye-Williams has been on the other side of that glue - she has been the founder, the one whose head has to hold everything at once - and she has been the operator, at Bain, coaching entertainment clients. She has been the investor, as a general partner at Baron Davis Ventures. She has sat inside a talent agency at William Morris Endeavor and inside a family office run by a former NBA point guard. There are not many people who have done all of those things, which is a nice way of saying: her pattern-matching is unusual.

Akoma Health, or the case for a heart-shaped market.

Akoma is the Akan word for heart. It is also the name of the company Okuneye-Williams founded during and after her Stanford MBA. Akoma Health is a teletherapy platform that connects Africans, on the continent and in the diaspora, with mental health professionals who share their cultural context. The founding statistic is the one she quotes: six of the ten countries with the highest suicide rates in the world are in Africa. The supply statistic is worse: Nigeria, with more than 200 million people, has roughly 350 psychiatrists.

She built Akoma the way you build a company when you have watched founders up close and decided you can do the thing they are doing. She raised capital, hired therapists and coaches, sold into employers, launched into Nigeria, and eventually took the company to profitability and an exit. Google's Black Founders Fund picked Akoma as one of forty startups from four thousand applicants. Visible Hands backed it. She stayed on the record about the mission the whole way through, which is how you end up with a page like the Stanford GSB voices profile that describes her, correctly, as the founder of a mental health company and, incidentally, as someone who was once a performer and once a Goldman analyst.

The relevant point for Nerdio is not the therapy company. It is the exit. It is very hard to sit next to a founder-CEO and translate his intent if you have never held that intent yourself. Chiefs of Staff at scaling startups are, in effect, apprentices to the top job. Okuneye-Williams has already served the apprenticeship, from the other chair.

Performer first, banker second.

Before Goldman, before Stanford, before any of the rest of it, she was a performer. She has been open about this. She has also been open about the decision to stop chasing it. The line she gave Stanford was not romantic - "even at my best I never had the goal of becoming the next Beyonce, because that happens once in a blue moon" - and it is a useful clue to how she thinks. She is not a person who confuses ambition with fantasy. The Beyonce outcome is a lottery ticket. Building a mental health company for African populations is a market.

Her father supplied the other line she keeps. He told her, sometime before any of this, that she was going to be remembered no matter what, and it was up to her whether it was for good or bad. That is a heavier thing to hand a child than most fathers hand their children. She appears to have taken it literally.

She grew up in London among a majority-immigrant population. She was Head of Strategy for the Women in the City Afro-Caribbean Network. At Stanford she cites Irv Grousbeck, Rob Siegel, Anne Beyer, Glenn Kramon, Peter Kelly, and Allison Kluger as the professors who mattered. Grousbeck is the entrepreneurship-through-acquisition legend; Siegel is the operator's operator; Kluger runs communication. The reading list is telling. It is a founder's reading list and an operator's reading list at the same time.