Operations
topic on 9 shows · 11 statements across 11 episodes
Startups For the Rest of Us 
We Live to Build 
the Knowledge Project 
Masters of Scale 
Latent Space 
the Official SaaStr Podcast 
Catalyst 
the a16z Podcast 
20VC
11 statements about Operations, every show
Wong: Utility planning studies rarely feed into real-time operations
“Of course, each utility might be different, but that is a very, very rare scenario, that they, these study assumptions and results actually feed into operations because they're measured by the different results and KPIs and all that kind of stuff.”
Hendrickson: Scaling operations is ten times harder than scaling marketing
“Scaling operations is about 10 times harder than scaling the marketing.”
Cool: CEOs rarely have finance backgrounds compared to sales or operations
“Oftentimes CEOs are great operators. They usually have come from sales or marketing or operations. They seldom come from finance, and it's not usually the career trajectory”
Sauer: Companies should hire dedicated operations staff by 20 employees
“Making that transition, it makes sense somewhere in your first 15 to 20 employees to get that going, if not sooner.”
Tolkin: Operations creates the most cross-functional tension with product teams
“Operations. The speed and cadence and types of problem solving is, is, is very, very different. And so it can be very challenging to all speak the same language on things that have a product or technical solution versus an ops based solution.”
Product managers must work directly inside operational workflows to understand friction
“But you really actually need product to live in the weeds with operations and intimately understand the challenges and the experiences and the frictions and the deficiencies.”
Hsu: Best AI adoption is engineering-driven, not operations-driven
“I think the companies that adopt AI the best, it is going to be engineering driven, I think, rather than, like, operations driven or anything else.”
Individual compute operations currently cost around $10^-18
“Like operations cost like 10 to the -18 dollars these days”
The Physical Operations Sector Accounts for Over One-Third of Global GDP
“We knew that the world of operations was really big, you know, it's over a third of the global GDP.”
English: The first hire when starting a company is operations
“So the first thing I do when I start a company is I say, who's going to do operations for me? Because they do all the stuff either that I'm incompetent at or that I'm bored at, and with a really good ops person, I then get to work on the fun stuff.”
Rao: Operations will persist but require software engineering skills
“I still think there's an element of operations around these workloads though, right? It's just the skill set and the type of people who are doing it are different. It's not your Classic DBA sysadmin. It's going to be someone more of an engineering skill set.”