COO role responsibilities at a startup: Marie Prokopets of Nira

The COO role responsibilities Marie Prokopets ended up with are not the ones she expected. She assumed the job meant fewer direct reports and a portfolio built around legal and HR. Instead she owns marketing, go to market, sales and customer success.

Prokopets is co-founder and chief operating officer of Nira, software used by enterprise IT teams to see and control who has access to company documents. Her path there ran through strategy and M&A at PricewaterhouseCoopers, product development at Diageo, roughly $26 billion of M&A work, four software products, and a side habit of writing comedy.

A winding path into operations

Prokopets took a business undergraduate degree largely because her parents, immigrants from Russia who arrived in the 1970s, considered it the sensible option. Her assessment at the time was that she really did not like it, which she partly attributes to not wanting to do what she had been told to do.

She followed it with a master's in English literature, which she notes is about as far from a business undergrad as you can get. This is a recurring pattern on this show. There is no required educational path to becoming a COO.

Journalism was the plan until the arithmetic ruled it out. The starting salary she was looking at was $21,000 a year, in a city where that did not work. She found her way into business writing instead, and from there into PricewaterhouseCoopers, moving from marketing into the strategy and M&A consulting practice. The deals were in retail, consumer and automotive. She points out, with some relief, that she never touched tech then, so nothing scared her off it.

Diageo came next, five and a half years of strategy and some M&A that turned into product development, which the company called Innovation. It was her first experience building something, in that case a physical product, and she discovered she loved all of it including the parts most people avoid. Her words for the risk analysis work are the nerdy stuff, said fondly. There is a great deal that can go wrong when you are making something people consume.

Then she left a stable job for San Francisco, met the person who became her co-founder, and has been building software since.

Why the COO seat rather than the CEO seat

Other people saw it first. Early in her career, colleagues told each other and then told her that they could picture her as COO of a public company. Her reaction was that she did not know what a COO was, or why they thought that.

The fit turns out to be temperamental. She likes the nuts and bolts of making an organization work and scaling it. She describes herself as risk minded and thorough, disinclined to make quick decisions at random, and slightly more risk averse than the average startup CEO. She is careful to add that thoughtful does not mean slow.

There is also the visibility question, which she answers with unusual candor. She is not the person who wants to speak in front of 500 people, and she was afraid of podcasts until a couple of years before this one. She would rather work on how the business runs than run around fundraising.

She and her co-founder went without titles for a long time. Titles arrived when the company raised money and someone had to formally own the fundraising.

The surprise: customer facing work under the COO

Nira splits the organization into engineering and everything else, and Prokopets runs everything else. That means marketing and go to market, sales, customer success and eventually customer support, alongside heavy collaboration with engineering.

It is not the conventional structure, and it was the biggest surprise of the job. It works for them in part because Nira sells to IT and security teams, with legal and compliance as secondary buyers, so the customer facing side benefits from an operator's rigor rather than pure sales instinct.

Prokopets had never touched sales or customer success before. Her approach has been to add operational discipline rather than mimic what she has seen elsewhere. Dashboards. Explicit goals and outcomes. The question she says she asks constantly is what the outcome of this meeting is and what goal it moves. Then measuring against those goals. Her observation is that both sales and customer success can be systematized, which suits how she thinks.

Learning a function you have never run

Asked what resources helped, Prokopets gives an answer that runs against the usual advice.

She does not love business books, and wonders aloud whether that is the same rebellious streak from college. She learns experientially, by trying a methodology, guessing at the parts she does not know, and doing it.

What she leans on instead is people. She is surrounded by experienced operators and has made a rule of never leaving a question unasked, however basic it might sound. She names customers and advisors as her best source, specifically because they have grown companies or held the exact roles she is selling into, former CIOs and sales leaders. Her point is that this differs from a book because the advice comes attached to a specific situation.

The problem that became the company

Nira did not begin as a security product. It started as an enterprise search tool called FYI, which connected to 24 collaboration applications including Gmail, Google Workspace, Slack and Microsoft Office so employees could search across all of them.

The pivot came during an in person onboarding in San Francisco. The customer, the CEO of a 50 person startup, opened the tool and started to panic. Nira's sidebar showed every person with access to each document, and he assumed Nira had shared them.

It had not. What he was looking at was his own company. A contractor who had not worked there in years still had access to confidential documents that were actively being edited. An employee had access through a personal email address for reasons nobody knew. Someone who had been fired still had access to a lot of things. He was about to raise a round and wanted everything buttoned up, so he stayed awake until 3:00 AM clicking through documents and removing people one document and one person at a time. Prokopets notes this was already easier than doing it natively, which says something about the baseline.

That was the moment she and her co-founder realized there was something here. What confirmed it was talking to IT teams, where controlling document access in Google Workspace or OneDrive appears in the actual job description. The more IT people they talked to, the clearer it became that a simple question, who has access to your company documents, had no available answer.

So they stopped working on enterprise search, focused entirely on the security product for about a year and a half, picked up customers including public and pre-IPO companies, renamed the company Nira and bought a four letter domain. She flags the domain purchase as its own operational surprise, and a separate story.

Their own survey put numbers on the problem. Roughly 32% of people said they could, that day, still access documents from a previous employer sitting in Google, Dropbox or Microsoft products. Another 20% or so said they had not checked, which means the real figure is likely higher.

Two vendor problems in one day

Michael's standing question is about the moment you look up and think you never expected to see that. Prokopets had one that morning and one from the archive, and both involve vendors.

The first is the kind of thing her product exists to catch. A vendor with access to confidential material built a folder by copying another vendor's folder structure. Every single person at that second vendor ended up with access, through a company wide group, and the material was searchable. Board notes were in there.

The second happened hours before the recording. Vendor A recommended Vendor B. Nira trusted the recommendation. Vendor B turned out not to follow the practices Vendor A itself recommends. Prokopets told Vendor A that they should reconsider the referral. Vendor A relayed it to Vendor B, who emailed her to say they had heard she had a problem with them. Hours of work were nearly lost, the day was spent managing relationships, and she was prepared to walk away from both.

The 5 things I took away from this conversation

1. The COO role gets shaped by what the company is short of, not by convention. Prokopets expected legal and HR and got sales, marketing and customer success. At a startup the split that matters is often just engineering and everything else. Anyone taking a COO job should ask which half of that line they are on before they accept.

2. Operational rigor is a real advantage in go to market. She had never run sales, and rather than imitate a sales leader she brought dashboards, explicit outcomes and measurement. The habit of asking what the outcome of this meeting is would improve most sales organizations I have seen. Not knowing the playbook turned out to be less of a handicap than expected.

3. Ask the question you think is too basic. Her stated rule is that there is never a question she will not ask. For an operator inheriting an unfamiliar function, this is the whole strategy. The alternative, quietly guessing to protect your credibility, is how people spend a year being wrong.

4. Learn to end a thought when the meeting ends. Context switching came up as the defining skill of the job, and her method is unglamorous: take obsessive notes so you are not carrying information around in your head. She types through meetings specifically so she can let each thing go. That is a system for attention, not a note taking habit.

5. Nobody can answer who has access to their documents, including you. Their survey found about a third of people can still open files at a company they left. The reason this persists is that it is nobody's daily emergency until it is. If you are an operator, this is a fifteen minute audit that is almost certainly overdue.

FAQ

What are the COO role responsibilities at an early stage startup? At Nira the COO owns everything outside engineering, which means marketing, go to market, sales, customer success and eventually customer support. Prokopets notes this is not traditional. She expected a narrower remit around functions like legal and HR, and the broader version came from splitting the org into engineering and non-engineering.

How is being a COO at a startup different from a large company? Prokopets frames it as a tension between two instincts. The role rewards being thorough and risk aware, but a startup is fighting the clock and does not have unlimited cash, so every day carries weight. The muscle you have to build is flexibility, which she says people do not typically associate with COOs.

How do you become a COO without a traditional business path? Prokopets has a business undergraduate degree and a master's in English literature, and moved through business writing, strategy and M&A consulting, and product development before co-founding a company. Her view is that the educational path does not determine the outcome. The disposition that pointed people toward the role for her was being operationally minded, thorough and comfortable with detail.

How do you handle context switching as a COO? Two habits. First, actually closing a topic when you leave it rather than carrying it into the next conversation. Second, taking heavily organized notes during meetings so the details live somewhere retrievable instead of in your head, which is what makes letting go possible.

Who has access to your company documents right now? Most companies cannot answer this, which is the problem Nira was built to solve. Former contractors, departed employees and personal email accounts frequently retain access to live documents. In Nira's survey, about 32% of people said they could still reach a previous employer's files, and another 20% had not checked.

Also mentioned

• Nira, the document access product, and its predecessor FYI, an enterprise search tool spanning 24 collaboration apps
• Hiten Shah, Prokopets' co-founder
• PwC and Diageo, where Prokopets worked in strategy, M&A and product development
• Google Workspace, Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox, the document platforms where stale access accumulates
• Offboarding and access revocation guidance from CISA, for operators who want a starting point on the problem above

Listen to the full episode

Marie Prokopets on Between Two COO's

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