Chief of Staff
Grand Vizier
What it does: my main contact. It turns my morning and evening instructions into tasks, delegates them and tracks what finishes.
Hi, I'm Elmer
I've been a manager at Uber for seven years, based in the Netherlands. Today I work on AI transformation for Uber's operations team. Previously, I managed operations across several EMEA markets. Before that, I did an MBA at Stanford and an MSc in Finance at Imperial College London.
On the personal side, I have a wife and two young children, and they matter more to me than any of this.
My team of agents is what lets me continue to give Uber my full attention during working hours and still have time with my family and to keep up with school activities, after-school clubs, shopping, and the rest of running a household. They keep working in the background the whole time, so I get far more done than my own hours would allow.
Sorbeno is my own business, and it is independent of Uber.
A day at Sorbeno
Weekdays:
- Early morning (1-2 hours): I read the morning brief from Grand Vizier (chief of staff) and set the day's work.
- Day shift: Grand Vizier distributes the tasks across the team, and they work while I'm at Uber.
- Evening (1-2 hours): I review the work and set the night shift.
- Night shift: Grand Vizier distributes the tasks across the team, and they work while I sleep.
- Quick check-ins during my lunch break and car commute (via live voice call with Grand Vizier).
Weekend:
- I plan the week ahead.
I'm at Uber, and the team researches, builds and revises on its own. Grand Vizier checks on the others every ten minutes and logs each piece of work as it finishes.
Who's on shift
Elmer
Personal Assistant
What it does: keeps track of the family side of life. It reads the school messages, keeps the family calendar in sync, and sends an evening digest and a Friday preview of the weekend.
Researcher
What it does: competitor research, cost studies and market scans.
Python Scout
What it does: finds leads, drafts outreach and builds sales tools.
CRM Manager
What it does: keeps the sales pipeline and contact lists in order.
Freelancer agents
Freelancer agents join for one job and then leave. Recent ones built a booking-agent demo, OCR for scanned PDFs, a Portuguese and Dutch interface for the booking demo, and interactive property walkthroughs.
Things I build for children, and for adults
I want screen time, in my house and in other people's, to go into learning or making something. So outside client work, my agents and I build a few things like that. Some are for children, and some are for adults or the whole family.
- Olá, mundo! is a Portuguese tutor for kids, led by Pipo the bird, with lessons in units and short stories. Kids can play it in the browser, and the code is on GitHub.
- An open-world game set in Luanda, Angola, is still under construction.
- A Aventura da Pala is a maths game for kids aged 4 to 10. Pala, a giant sable antelope (Angola's national animal), takes them across seven places in Angola.
What doesn't change
I review and sign off every client deliverable before it goes out. Client data is kept out of the agents' shared memory.
Get in touch
Email me a short note about what you need.