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by mrDmrTmrJ 934 days ago
For a decade, "operator" in Silicon Valley as has been used exactly as the commentator above describes it.

Which creates separation from "investor" or "engineer" or "founder" or "PM" or "sales" or "finance". Somebody has to make stuff happen in organizations. And the people who are good at it (Satya is excellent) set their organizations up for unique success.

And yes, ex-special forces people roll their eyes at it. Which is appropriate! But the usage is now totally distinct.
2 comments
zrail 933 days ago
I learned the business context before the spec ops context and honestly the former makes way more sense to me than the latter.

A business operator is like a machine operator. You're pulling levers on a machine that someone else built while optimizing and tweaking to get the best performance out of that machine as possible.

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benatkin 932 days ago
I was quite wrong about this, but I still don't think it's especially relevant that someone else built it. You would never call Zuckerberg an operator? Or when someone else built it does that not mean that you had no role in building it? That would be the exception, but it would be analogous to owner/operator in general business parlance.

I think now, having tried to fill in my missing knowledge, that it comes from the same root as DevOps, which I erroneously thought was related to SpecOps. DevOps comes from IT Operations which comes from Operations Management, which yes, is like a machine operator. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IT_operations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_management

Edit: here's a post with "Founder Operators". Which seems like maybe if you just heard "Operator" you would assume they're not a founder, but also that the term can be applied for those running businesses they founded: https://startupceo.com/2023/01/5-things-successful-founder-o...

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benatkin 934 days ago
It seems like underselling the successful part and overselling the part about not being the founder, but I can see it's a slang term. Thanks.

And yeah I'm wrong about it being the same term, though I did imagine a different use, I was also thinking of smooth operator, apparently I was unfamiliar with the term in tech.

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