The most honest document in a company may be the CEO's calendar. It reveals what receives attention, which decisions cannot wait, whose voice gets heard and whether a leader has been allowed ten quiet minutes to eat. It is strategy translated into rectangles. Rachel Chavez has spent years reading those rectangles, moving them, defending them and noticing the chain reaction that begins whenever one changes.
Now the senior executive business partner to the CEO of Redpanda Data, Chavez works beside a company operating in real-time data infrastructure. The vocabulary fits her. Her own craft is about streams of requests, limited capacity, priority conflicts and the cost of latency. But while software can route packets, the person beside a chief executive must route something messier: human expectation.
Chavez's public account of that work is unusually concrete. She has called calendar management a “beautiful game of Tetris.” The phrase gives a colorful shape to a role often flattened into a list: scheduling, travel, expense reports. In her version, the blocks are alive. Move one meeting and a project may slow. Delay another and a relationship may cool. Accept every invitation and the executive becomes a row of appointments with no time left to be a person.
“There's a ripple effect that happens, and we have to handle all those ripples.”
01 / The real calendarThirty minutes is not always thirty minutes
Chavez once described the familiar message: a colleague sees a 30-minute opening and asks to claim it. Her answer begins by looking beyond the white space. Perhaps four hours of meetings come before it and three more follow. The opening exists mathematically. Physiologically, it may belong to lunch, a bathroom break or one unhurried breath.
This is executive support as interpretation. The calendar does not merely record availability. It presents a simplified model of a day, and Chavez supplies the missing variables. She knows what the last trip was for, what a stack of receipts refers to and how an executive actually works. The job depends on proximity, pattern recognition and judgment accumulated one request at a time.
The distinction matters because organizations can confuse access with effectiveness. A leader who is technically available may be cognitively spent. A meeting that fits may still be poorly timed. Chavez treats those conditions as operational facts, not indulgences. Protecting the human being is one way of protecting the quality of the decisions.
02 / The operating systemDetails are a kindness
Ask Chavez how to work well with an executive assistant and she becomes wonderfully specific. Send the time frame. Include the hard deadline, necessary attendees, meeting length and reason. Her appetite for context is generous: “You're never going to bore us with details,” she has said. The point is not bureaucracy. It is speed.
A complete request lets her prioritize without a scavenger hunt. It reduces back-and-forth and allows one reply to do useful work: confirmation made, invitation sent. This is the sort of efficiency that feels almost luxurious because it begins with someone else respecting the problem enough to explain it.
Her preferred channel is email. It acts as a checklist, a durable queue in which filed or deleted means done. Chat, text and office drive-bys lack the same reliable closure. Her choice is less a rejection of modern communication than a clear-eyed assessment of cognitive load. When every channel is urgent, no channel is trustworthy.
Bring the context
State the purpose, people, duration and deadline before the scheduling begins.
See the whole board
A single opening is connected to projects, relationships, preparation and energy.
Keep it human
Efficiency works better when the people involved feel respected and understood.
There is also a boundary in her method. If someone dislikes the answer and copies the CEO hoping to obtain a different one, the maneuver usually loops back to Chavez. She owns the calendar because she holds information the executive does not need to carry. Going around the operator only adds motion. It does not add capacity.
03 / Career geometryA door opened by a mentor
Chavez arrived at Cloudflare through a relationship. While looking for a role in early 2016, she contacted a mentor who had guided her near the beginning of her executive-assistant career. The mentor knew a leader who had just asked about strong EA candidates and introduced Chavez by email to Cloudflare co-founder Michelle Zatlyn.
Research and on-site interviews followed. Chavez went on to support Zatlyn and co-founder Matthew Prince, eventually concentrating on Prince as CEO. By 2021 she had been at Cloudflare for a little over four years. The referral story became a small parable of the principle she would later articulate: great executive-assistant work is built on human relationships.
At Cloudflare, Chavez was more than an endpoint of that network. A colleague credited her as the hiring manager who brought her aboard. Chavez also helped with Cloudflare TV, the internet company's always-on experiment in employee programming, and appeared on screen herself. In a 2020 game-show episode, she introduced herself as Prince's support partner and one of the people helping Cloudflare TV run every day.
Her public professional recommendations add texture. Former colleagues describe calm under rising pressure, executive-level empathy, careful planning, grit and joy. One wrote that Chavez multiplies the impact of high-performing leaders and teams. Another emphasized her ability to establish working relationships quickly and get things done without treating any useful task as beneath her.
In November 2017, Admin Awards Bay Area gave Chavez its Above and Beyond Award. The title suits the testimony, though it can also obscure the mechanism. “Above and beyond” sounds like heroic extra effort. Chavez's own explanation is more disciplined: learn the values, build trust, understand the wider project and anticipate what the next move will disturb.
“I think what makes a great EA is human relationships.”
04 / The human protocolKindness with a completion date
Chavez draws a line between being capable at the job and being great at it. Multitasking, efficiency, flexibility, calendars, travel and expenses can make someone successful. Greatness begins when the assistant understands that they represent themselves, the executive and the company, then acts with the values of all three in view.
Her summary sounds almost too plain for the complexity around it: be a good person, be kind, be empathetic and treat people as you want to be treated. In a corporate handbook, those words could float away. In her practice, they attach to decisions. Flexibility offered today builds reciprocity for the day when moving something is impossible. Approachability improves the quality of information people share. Respect keeps a scheduling conflict from becoming a status contest.
The method survived the abrupt move to remote work. Chavez built a home office, kept a morning routine, walked her dog at lunch and tried to step away from the desk around 5:30. She missed a subtle benefit of commuting: the train had been protected time to read in the morning and decompress at night. At home, she had to reconstruct those edges deliberately.
She also found that virtual executive support demanded more explicit communication. An assistant could no longer walk to a conference room to see why someone was late. Hiring a close counterpart without meeting in person felt strange. Video helped, but the accidental texture of the office had disappeared. Again, the invisible work became visible when the usual system vanished.
05 / The next streamOperating in real time
Chavez's move to Redpanda Data places this operating philosophy inside another fast company. Redpanda builds data-streaming infrastructure and in April 2025 announced a $100 million Series D, a $1 billion valuation and an expansion into enterprise agentic AI. Technical ambition of that scale creates a dense executive environment: customers, employees, investors, products and priorities all arriving at different speeds.
Her current title, senior executive business partner to the CEO, recognizes what the work has always contained. Partnership is not possession of a busy calendar. It is stewardship of attention. Seniority is not merely the number of years near powerful people. It is the judgment to understand which request serves the company, which can move and which human needs a moment before the next block lands.
A recent public gesture completes the portrait. When layoffs affected people at Cloudflare, Chavez invited members of her former administrative team to contact her directly and offered help. The career had begun with a mentor making an introduction. Years later, Chavez was using her own network as a bridge for others.
That may be the quiet lesson behind the Tetris metaphor. The object is not to cram every block into the available space. It is to understand how the pieces relate, make deliberate room and keep the board from becoming a wall. Companies reward speed, but speed without context is merely haste. Chavez's craft is the pause that lets the right thing happen next.