[zrail]

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.

[benatkin]

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...