Guest: Zen Foo, Chief of Staff, Aspire

Host: Tristan Lim, founder of Beyond Founders and Chief of Staff Network Singapore chapter lead

Episode Overview

Most companies want AI adoption to happen and can't figure out who should drive it. Zen Foo makes the case that the Chief of Staff is the only person with the cross-functional context to pull it off, then walks through the three stages every company moves through, from hype to beautiful chaos to governance. The conversation turns candid on the harder parts of the job: people pleasing, likability versus respect, and protecting your principal's trust when the calls get tough.

About Zen Foo

Zen started his career trading Treasury bonds and interest rate swaps at HSBC in London. The pay was great and the work was intellectually sharp, but doing the same thing every day felt like Groundhog Day, so he left before the money got too good. He moved into tech at Monzo, realized what he actually loved was generalist, first-principles problem solving, and eventually landed at Aspire, where he now runs Chief of Staff and leads AI enablement for the whole company. He frames the role as the ultimate learning experience: two to three years of learning every part of a business before you specialize.

Key Takeaways

- The Chief of Staff is naturally incentivized to master AI because the job is constant context switching. Zen hasn't opened Word, Excel, or PowerPoint in six months because he works out of Claude and it holds his context for him.

- AI enablement is deeply cross-functional, which is exactly why it needs the Chief of Staff. The CEO or COO is usually too far removed to own org-wide governance, policy, and shared tooling.

- The hard part isn't deciding what to build, it's getting people to adopt it. Token quotas and mandates don't work. Getting one person to their magic moment does, and enough of those micro moments add up to a company-wide shift.

- Teach people to fish. Zen's AI Champions program seeds at least one excited person per team, equips them with advanced techniques, then lets them evangelize and build on their own.

- If you're stuck in the weeds, treat learning AI as an investment and block real hours (Zen did two a night for a month). Ask Claude to build you a 30-day program from zero. The tool is both the instruction manual and the tool.

- People pleasing is common among Chiefs of Staff, and Zen admits he hasn't solved it. His honest read: it's part of what got high achievers where they are, and some of it you just accept.

Zen and Tristan met at a Chief of Staff Network meetup in Singapore, one of the network's fastest-growing chapters. If you're doing this work in Asia, that's the room to be in.

Learn more about the Chief of Staff Network's membership, courses, and events here: https://www.chiefofstaff.network/

Join us in Singapore at Chief of Staff Connect Singapore Forum