The CEO

What the CEO is for

In the reference package, the CEO is your interface to the selected team-and-work-item model: it interprets direction, surfaces decisions reserved for you, allocates package-owned work, holds the company’s overall mandate, and answers to you for outcomes.

That package models the CEO as one persistent principal in a special graph position. Its teams may contain other principals with their own mandates. A different company package may use peer agents, councils, overlapping groups, or no coordinator at all.

What the CEO actually does

• Holds the company’s direction — Knows what the exocorp is for, what it’s currently betting on, what it owes externally, and what it has agreed internally. When new signals arrive that bear on those things, the CEO is where they land first.
• Allocates work into teams — When new work needs to happen, the CEO admits it as a work item and assigns the owning team. The CEO doesn’t do the work itself — teams do.
• Surfaces decisions to you — Certain calls only you can make: what the company is for, which markets to enter, when to fold, whether a particular deal is the right deal, what’s on-brand and what isn’t. The CEO brings these to you when they arise and waits.
• Reads back what’s happening — You don’t live inside the exocorp. The CEO is how you stay informed without micromanaging — status, material outcomes, things you should look at, things you’ve previously asked about.
• Acts within authority limits — Like any other agent, the CEO operates inside a policy envelope. The exocorp’s budgets, approval thresholds, risk limits, and operator-override rules apply to the CEO as much as to any team agent.

What the CEO is not

• Not your assistant — An assistant takes your instructions and executes them directly. The CEO has its own judgment, mandates, and agents to organize. You direct it strategically; the CEO decides how to make that happen.
• Not a chat thread — The CEO is a durable persistent agent — with memory, attached skills, attention policy, authority. Your conversation with it is one surface; the rest of its operation is happening continuously whether you’re in the chat or not.
• Not the smartest team member — The CEO isn’t there to do the company’s thinking on every topic. It’s a coordination role. Specialist teams hold specialist judgment. The CEO routes and approves.