Life is a mystery. You do not always know what the full life is —
it is found by dreaming.
it is found by dreaming.
The southern Milky Way — Vela's home sky
A fractional chief of staff for founders and leaders
Bring us the problem — even the one that looks impossible
A sail does two things at once. It surrenders — it cannot make the wind blow, and it doesn't pretend to. And it works — trimmed, tended, and set with skill, it turns what it's given into motion. That's how we take on problems. We don't arrive with the answer pre-decided. We take the problem whole, work every avenue, and keep working until the way through appears — usually somewhere better than anyone had imagined.
You hand us the problem as it actually is — unsolved, tangled, “impossible.” We don't need it pre-shaped into a request. The problem is the brief.
We map every avenue forward — the obvious ones, the creative ones, the ones nobody has priced yet — and go to work on the paths that show life.
Possible avenues get worked until they start looking probable: numbers run, people called, drafts written, terms tested against reality.
No probable path is done until it carries at least three contingencies. Safety nets under safety nets — so the improbable can be walked on.
For founders and leaders carrying too much: a chief of staff a few days a week, with two decades of operating beside principals — brought to your business without the full-time hire.
Two decades of chief-of-staff work — fund administration, investor relations, legal review, systems, people — brought to your business a few days a week instead of a full-time hire.
VelaVentus is Justin and Lauren Kielhorn — two operators, each with more than two decades of running the work behind the work.
Lauren has led operations for decades: building teams, running programs, and keeping the systems and relationships that hold an organization together. She leads VelaVentus’s client engagements and is the person you’ll work with day to day — the same operational discipline, with the stronger read on people and the instinct for what a leader actually needs before they ask.
Justin has run operations beside principals for over two decades — currently as Chief of Staff at Murray Hill Group, a deep-tech venture firm — and holds a Licentiate in Canon Law from The Catholic University of America. He builds the systems, the documents and the numbers behind every engagement.
We keep the practice small deliberately. A few clients, worked deeply, with the freedom to live the way we ask our clients to dream — part of the year in Michigan, part in South Africa, part in Utah. The dream is free. The work is what makes it real.
Tell us the problem as it actually is. We'll tell you, plainly, whether we can work it — and what the first month would look like.
Write to VelaVentusWant to learn the chief of staff craft? We are building a small crew.
Write to Justin