The person who keeps the CEO on their marks
Samantha Andonian learned to run a room in the theater, then spent a decade running the days of the leaders at Google, Slack, Bumble, Render and Splice. Here is what an executive business partner actually does, and why founders keep asking for her.
The first thing to know about Samantha Andonian is that she started in a world where being one beat off could ruin the whole night. Before the calendars and the CEOs, she was a stage manager. At Disneyland Resort, and later in regional theater, her job was to hold the timing of a live show together while a hundred moving parts pretended the timing came naturally. Lights, cues, entrances, a performer who is thirty seconds late. Nobody in the audience is supposed to notice the person making it all land. That is the job. It is also, more or less, the job she has done ever since.
These days the stage is a fast-growing tech company, and the show is a chief executive's week. Andonian is an executive business partner, which is the current and more honest name for what used to get filed under "assistant." Over roughly a decade she has sat beside the leaders of Google, Slack, Bumble, Render and Splice, doing the unglamorous, high-stakes work of making a very busy person effective. The title has changed as the profession has grown up. The instinct behind it has not.
The OriginCue sheets before calendars
Andonian trained where you would expect someone who cares about timing to train: in theater. She studied theater design and production at the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television, with time at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts along the way. Her early resume reads like a person learning to run complicated things quietly - assistant stage manager work, an associate producer credit at a theatre festival, administrative roles in small arts organizations where the budget is thin and the margin for error is thinner.
Theater is a useful place to learn operations because nothing is theoretical. The curtain goes up whether or not you are ready. You cannot ship a patch tomorrow. That pressure builds a specific kind of person: calm when things slip, obsessive about the sequence of events, comfortable being invisible while everyone else takes the bow. Those are the exact traits that make a good executive partner, which is probably why the jump from backstage to the C-suite felt less like a career change and more like a change of venue.
Someone who thrives in high-context, fast-moving environments and wants to have a real impact on how we operate and scale.Andonian, describing the role - and, not incidentally, herself
The ClimbFrom Google to the corner office
The corporate chapter began at Google, where she spent about five years as an administrative business partner. Google is where a lot of people learn the mechanics of supporting executives at scale, and it clearly stuck. From there she moved to Slack, and this is where her trajectory gets interesting. She did not stay put. She started as a senior executive assistant to the chief product officer and worked her way up to a principal executive assistant supporting leadership - a title that signals seniority and scope rather than a bigger inbox.
Her Slack years overlapped with one of the more disorienting things that can happen to a company: getting acquired. When Salesforce bought Slack in 2021, the people supporting leadership had to absorb the chaos and keep the trains running while the ground shifted under everyone. Andonian later talked about that period publicly, not as a war story but as a lesson in leading through change. It is a small tell about how she thinks. The interesting part of an acquisition, to her, is not the drama. It is the operations.
- EARLY CAREERAssistant stage manager at Disneyland Resort; producing and admin roles in theater.
- 2014 - 2019Administrative Business Partner at Google.
- 2019 - 2024Slack - senior EA to the CPO, rising to principal executive assistant.
- 2024 - 2025Executive Admin to the CEO at Bumble Inc.
- 2025Executive Operations / Business Partner to the CEO at Render.
- 2026Executive Business Partner to the CEO at Splice.
After Slack came Bumble, where she was the executive admin to the CEO, and then Render, a developer-infrastructure startup, where she was the executive business partner to the CEO. Contact records now list her at Splice, the music-creation platform, in the same kind of seat. The industries could not be more different - social, developer tools, music software. The role does not really change. She attaches herself to the person carrying the most weight and takes as much of it off their plate as she can.
The CraftWhat an executive business partner actually does
Here is the part outsiders tend to get wrong. The job is not scheduling. Scheduling is a symptom of the job. A CEO's calendar is really a document about priorities, and reading it well means understanding which meeting is load-bearing and which one is a polite mistake. Andonian reads a calendar the way a stage manager reads a script: every entry is a cue, every gap is a decision, and the whole thing only works if someone is thinking three scenes ahead.
Do it well and you become leverage. The executive gets to spend their scarce attention on the one or two things only they can do, because someone trustworthy is handling the other forty. Do it badly and you become a bottleneck. The difference between those two outcomes is judgment, and judgment is the thing you cannot put in a job description, which is exactly why good executive partners are hard to hire and harder to keep.
There is a phrase Andonian used in a public job post that doubles as a personal motto. She wrote that she wanted to hire someone who is "sharp, kind, and love building leverage for people and teams." Read it a second time and it stops being a job requirement. It is a description of how she has run her own career. Sharp enough to see around corners, kind enough that people want to work with her, and wired to make everyone around her more effective rather than to be the loudest person in the room.
If you're sharp, kind, and love building leverage for people and teams - we'd love to hear from you.From a hiring post - a self-portrait disguised as a job spec
The CommunityRaising the whole profession
The other thing Andonian does is refuse to keep the knowledge to herself. She is an active voice in eaMAFIA and its sister community eaRISE, peer networks for elite executive assistants in tech. If the name sounds cheeky, the mission is not. These groups exist to treat executive support as a real profession with career paths, mentorship and standards, rather than a stopgap job you do until something better comes along. Andonian recruits for roles through the community and shows up to talk shop with people trying to level up.
She has sat on panels about building and leading EA teams, including one with fellow former Slack assistants hosted by Maven Recruiting Group, where the conversation was less about tips and tricks and more about leadership: how do you mentor a team of assistants, how do you build a culture, how do you manage people whose entire job is managing complexity for someone else. It is a quietly radical framing. The assistant, in her telling, is not below the org chart. The assistant is running an invisible operating system that the whole company depends on.
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The TakeawayWhy founders keep asking for her
There is a reason her career reads as a straight line through very different companies. Founders talk to each other, and the highest compliment in that world is a referral. When a CEO leaves a company and immediately wants to bring their executive partner along, or when a founder asks around for "someone like the person who ran things at Slack," that is the market putting a price on judgment. Andonian has been on the receiving end of that word-of-mouth for years.
What makes her worth writing about is not any single title. It is the argument her whole career makes: that the person keeping the leader focused is doing strategic work, and that the craft deserves the same respect as the roles it supports. She learned that lesson in a theater, where the show does not happen without the person nobody claps for. She has spent a decade proving it holds up in tech, one impossibly full calendar at a time.
The audience still is not supposed to notice. That has always been the point.