Symi

Panoramic watercolor of a Greek island harbor, overlaid with a code editor window, circuit traces, and a neural network graph in technical ink.

Kurt Collins, Fractional Chief of Staff & AI implementation.

I work with startup founders and small-company executives. On any given day, I work on the thing that will most meaningfully move forward the vision of the person I'm staffing. When that work needs a process automated or a system built, I build it rather than write a memo about it. That is the practice: the thinking and the making are one job.

What Symi does

Two services, so strategy and execution stay in the same hands.

Fractional Chief of Staff

A Chief of Staff is a founder's right hand: a senior operator who takes work off the founder's plate and makes sure the important things actually happen. Fractional means you get one without a full-time hire: typically a few hours per day, embedded with the founder or CEO.

In practice:

  • Business development: identifying and pursuing the partnerships, customers, and relationships that grow the company.
  • Special projects: the important-but-never-urgent things that never get done until someone owns them.
  • Coordinating how teams work together: aligning people and functions so things move without the founder dragging them along.
  • Board & investor communication: the story behind the numbers, told clearly and on time.

AI & systems implementation

The technical half of the same job: as Chief of Staff, implementing the systems myself instead of writing a memo about them. This means setting up and running tools like Claude Code and OpenClaw, wired into the software the company already uses.

In practice:

  • Automating internal systems and processes: the workflows, handoffs, and busywork that AI and software can now do for you.
  • AI-native tooling: reporting, research, customer operations, and document flow, built into how the company actually works.
  • Working systems, not strategy papers: delivered running.
  • Ongoing operation: systems stay running and get updated as the company changes, without a consultant having to come back.

Current projects

Two things currently in build, both shaped by the same job: tools for people who work with agents.

Lantern Coming soon

A personal CRM built for agents. Lantern stores relationship facts: people, interactions, notes, and follow-up cadences, together with the provenance behind every claim. You reach it through your own AI agent rather than a web form, and nothing in it is a guess: a model's hunch can't become fact.

URL.rip Coming soon

A URL shortener built for agents. Links are created programmatically by AI agents through an MCP connection, and every link carries provenance: who created it, from what conversation, citing what source. Long URLs rest in peace.

Writing

How I think about the work, in my own words.

The name

Watercolor of a Greek island harbor, dissolving into blank paper on the left.

Symi is an island off the coast of Rhodes in Greece, in the Dodecanese. Its southern coast holds Panormitis, the monastery of the Archangel Michael, patron of Dodecanese sailors, in a church standing since 1783.

For generations, sailors in distress promised him a silver offering if he brought them home; his walls are covered with their votive ships, sent from every sea the Dodecanese ever sailed.

And still today the bay receives prayers in bottles from ships far away, delivered by the water itself to a harbor a few thousand people call home.

A small island, a far reach, a harbor the whole sea writes to. This practice carries that name.

Get in touch

If you need a Chief of Staff, a working AI implementation, or both at once, write. Or find me on LinkedIn.